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THE EXODUS 


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FIRST AUTOGRAPH EDITION 










Lewis fell upon his knees and with upraised hands implored: 
Don’t Marse Bob Your daddy, Marse Lucius, wasn’t dat mean in 
slavery time!’’ 

“Oh hell Nigger, this aint slavery time. You are free now and 
must pay your debts or be killed. My daddy owned you in slavery 
time. The only way I can get what [ want out of you is to kill you 
if you don’t do as I say!” 





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THE EXODUS! 


P. J. CLYDE RANDALL 


PITTSBURGH, PENNA 
Peoples Printing Company 
1919 


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Copyright, 1919, By 

P, J. CLYDE RANDALL 





CONTENTS 


Chapter. Page 

Introduction 1 

Failure and Degradation With Plenty 4 

II. The Cabin and the Big House 10 

III. Horoscope and Horizon 14 

IV. Saxon Versus Saxon 18 

V. Winning Hearts With Song . 24 

VI. In a Cottage on a Hill 29 

VII. How Whites Taught Blacks 30 

VIII. Their Chrysalis Broken 33 

IX. Alabama - Talladega - Tuskegee 39 

X. In the Great, Big Free North 44 

XI. The Nation’s Birthday — A Dainty Maiden 47 

XII. Soldiers of the British Empire 52 

XIII. White Friends From Down South 54 

XIV. Heroes of the University Football and 

Baseball Team 56 

i 

XV. Winning In Oratory and Scholarship 59 

XVI. The Master Scientist of His Class 63 

XVII. Making Good In the World’s Broad Field 

of Battle 65 

XVIII. A Call to the South: 67 

XIX. Paris and France Gloriously. Welcome Grand 

Corps of French African Soldiers 70 


CONTENTS 


XX. England’s Colored Soldiers . ... 73 

XXI. Uncle Sam’s Colored Soldiers 75 

XXII. Europe at War. . . ., ». 80 

XXIII. Mexico and Carrizal 84 

XXIV. Riot, Explosions and Burnings in the North.. 87 

XXV. A Jim Crow Car for Our Maiden 89 

XXVI. Martyr In Defense of Virtue and Womanhood. 96 

XXVII. A Bad Nigger Lynched • 102 

XXVIII. Other Georgia Lynchings 104 

XXIX. Torrents and Terrors 105 

XXX. Before the Floods Came and After • . . . . 107 

XXXI. At Home In Disguise 112 

XXXII. The EXODUS 117 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Lewis Fell Upon His Knees With Upraised Hands 
“Mister You Are Walking Upon The Flowers'’ * 





















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THE EXOHUB 


INTRODUCTION 

The first great lesson of history is that of an exodus. 
It was the first grand earthly climax to a constant but tor- 
tuous round of cold and calculated attempts to perpetuate 
the enslavement of the white race by the black. An exodus 
is the Old Testament lesson and story of Jehovah's triumph 
over Satan when the vast multitude of Jews, under the 
leadership of Moses, fled from Egypt, where Pharaoh exer- 
cised his lordship of bondage over them in cruelty and 
tyranny. This exodus of the Bible age affords ghastly pre- 
ludes and a bloody panorama, the most spectacular of any 
era, it embraces the self-same lessons of avarice and greed 
that come down to us of this day, the chief and indestruct- 
able tenets of that class of oppressors whose aim and faith 
is self, whose creed is self, who interprets creation as made 
for their aggrandizement and all else as subordinate to 
them, save Satan only, whose lordship and superiority they 
acknowledge as is made manifest by the quality of their 
deeds. 

After a number of centuries, this identical class of op- 
pressors, but within the Hebrew branch of the white race, 
still marshaled their forces under Satanic domination to 
enslave and oppress, when their chicanery and dogmatic 
struggle forced the New Testament exodus of Mary and 
her husband, Joseph, into Egypt to hide in darker Africa 
among black men the divine Christ child lately come from 
heaven and newly born on earth to save universal humanity 
that was hopelessly lost in centuries of sin. 

Although a cycle of centuries spent themselves in fierce 
contours, this class of oppressors yet survived and proved 
themselves as arrogant, domineering, and obstinate as in 
the early days when Pharaoh opposed Moses with Satanic 
might and Herod persecuted Christ with Satafiic craftiness. 
To the impetus that they of this class cinched during the 
darker and Middles Ages, new fiendish strength was added 
to dwarf and grind the good and meek of Medieval times, 


2 


THE EXODUS. 


and, with the beginning of the modern ages their old pent- 
up forces were hurled in England and France against the 
resolute and upright souls who loved Jehovah God and m 
practical simplicity pursued the narrow paths of plain living 
and right thinking, causing the Pilgrim Fathers and French 
Heugenots to make another historic exodus, exemplifying 
again and anew the irrepressible cry and thirst of the 
human soul for freedom and liberty. 

The coming of the Pilgrim Fathers and French Heuge- 
nots to a new world to build on a fresh continent cradles of 
freedom and free homes was taken as a potent prophecy that 
their exodus was the final one of human history and that 
the book of human oppression and tyranny had been with 
their flight under propitious and solemn circumstances for- 
ever sealed. Before their benign and godly thoughts were 
woven into the breath of noble actions, old world prescrip- 
tions and tyranny sought to contaminate the growth of the 
free life of a new world. The minute men and heroes of the 
American Revolution fought the battles of Bunker Hill and 
the war of our independence, the first martyr of which was 
Crispus Attucks, an American Negro. Surely with this 
victory for freedom, the new world and the new continents 
would forthwith become naught but asylums of freedom 
and liberty for all men, in which each in his own way could 
work out, unchained and unshackled, the high destiny of 
evolution and progress purposed by God for every human 
being of every human race. 

Preposterous was such Christian reasoning and whole- 
some thinking in the face of those in the new republic of 
America who plainly stood for the inhuman and low ideals 
that controlled and dominated Pharaoh in his stubborn 
opposition to Moses and the Hebrews, and which Satan had 
cultivated and developed through the multiplying ages from 
a class of oppressors to a party and section of oppressors. 
Thus we behold it to have been impossible for the tortured 
blacks of the Southland to have made an exodus en masse 
from bondage to freedom. 

So cunning, cruel, and vigilant had the Satanic forces 
become against an exodus from slavery to freedom that in 
the very republic of the new world, dedicated to the propo- 
sition that on July 4, 1776, solemnly declared, “All men are 
born free and equal and are endowed by their Creator with 
certain inalienable rights, among which are liberty, life and 
the pursuit of happiness, 1 ” every attempt of an exodus from 


INTRODUCTION 


3 


slaveland to freeland was instantly punished with inquisi- 
torial death. However, a numbei of exoduses were planned, 
chief of which were those led by Denmark Vesey, 1822; Nat 
Turner, 1881, both Negroes, and John Brown, a white man, 
with his sons and Negro leaders in 1859. Finding bold 
ways, as with Moses from Egypt, Mary with her husband 
and the Christ child to Egypt, the Pilgrim Fathers and 
French Heugenots from Europe to America, the daring 
Negroes of American bondage, realizing that the tyranny 
that they opposed had become more formidable and militant 
than that of Pharaoh, Herod, and the despots of European 
monarchies, invented THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 
by which they safely traveled from the Southland to the 
propitious Northland and to asylums of freedom in Canada. 

The war of Abraham Lincoln and the Union put an end 
to THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. Yet avarice and 
greed still live and most vigorously in the Southland where 
infliction and proscription hang dark and cankerous blan- 
kets on the land that to make free and glorious, brave men 
in mighty hosts offered up their lives, nobly singing as they 
fell on the battle fields: 

“As Christ died to make men holy, 

Let us die to make men free!” 

At this, the close of the third year of the Great World War, 
the black people of the South are making another epochal 
exodus, fleeing from the same age old Satanic oppression 
and tyranny, seeking Christian freedom and civil oppor- 
tunities in the lands of the North, East and West, which 
they aptly term, “God's Country.” 


4 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER I. 

FAILURE AND DEGRADATION WITH PLENTY 

For many, many years before “The Surrender,” that is 
back in slavery times, Lamart’s River Bottoms had been 
considered and known to be most fertile of farming lands. 
They never failed in yielding the biggest and finest of 
crops. Since “The Emancipation,” the Lamart extensive 
and spreading plantations were the most desirable and 
noted of the Southern Section. In many respects, the 
famous valleys of the River Nile were duplicated by the 
Ocmulge where it flowed through the valleys and over- 
flowed the banks that were embraced within the Lamart 
plantations. 

Under the new system of cultivating his lands and 
marketing the crops Robert Lamart prospered more than 
his father did under the antebellum way. Then his father 
was responsible for the clothing, food, medicines and physi- 
cians necessary for the Negro slaves. Now, his only re- 
sponsibility was getting as much wealth out of the Negroes’ 
toil as possible. They were his slaves now far more than 
they were his father’s before Abraham Lincoln signed the 
Emancipation Proclamation. In the South, such were the 
fruit of Southern facts and not Federal law. 

For many years Pollard Lewis had lived as tenant so 
far as the law was concerned on one of the farms of one of 
the noted Lamart plantations. He had a fine family, a wife, 
three brown boys, and two brotvn girls. Their time was 
spent at arduous and hard toil, with one definite, grand, and 
sublime goal ahead of them, the goal of coming out ahead, 
with some cash, after settling up with Lamart at the end 
of the harvest when the autumn glory ushered in the first 
biting frosts and the picking and ginning of cotton, gather- 
ing cereals and forage, and the banking of the potatoes had 
been finished. Their goal, year after year, with finer and 
finer, richer and richer annual yields, had been held out to 


FAILURE AND DEGRADATION WITH PLENTY 


5 . 


them. They had been urged to do their best, and spured up 
to exert themselves to their utmost. Not with an over- 
seer’s savage lash plied with might and main upon human 
flesh, was the force expended on them to secure the highest 
results from their brawny toil ; it was a subtle, cunning one , 
applicable to changed times and new conditions. Pollard 
Lewis and each member of his family had held out to them 
the time when they would come out ahead, when they would 
pay their debts and receive MONEY, SOME CASH OF 
THEIR OWN. Alas! such a result never came to them on 
the Lamart Plantation. Lamart had planned and purposed 
that they should never receive any money nor get ahead. 

It was one of those indescribable, inexpressible, insur- 
passable days of Dixieland. The glory of the day was every- 
where. It was brightness, fairness, warmth, sunshine, 
calmness, serenity, with variations of splendor in color and 
landscapes inaudibly proclaiming the beauty and scenic 
triumph of tranquil autumn over gushing, zestful spring, 
over flushed and burning summer, and over what winter 
might come to the sunny South. 

Frederick Douglass Lewis, the oldest boy, Theodore 
Roosevelt Lewis, next to the oldest; Ida Wells Lewis, Esther 
Rebecca Lewis, and Pollard Lewis, the youngest, were 
freshly bathed, their faces greased and polished and arrayed 
in their best clothing. The crops were all gathered and the 
remainder and the very best of them loaded and ready to 
be taken to town to Lamart. It was the one big time of 
the year for every member of this honest but simple hard- 
working Negro family. 

“Keep a inching along, keep a inching along; 

Jesus will come by 'nd by; 

Keep a inching along, keep a inching along, 

Jesus will come by ’nd by: 

Twas inch by inch I sought the Lord; 

Jesus will come by *nd by, 

And a inch by inch He blessed my soul, 

Jesus will come by 'nd by.” 


6 . 


THE EXODUS. 


Ida Wells Lewis led the song in clear and melodious 
soprano, sustained by Esther Rebecca's deep and full alto, 
and the fine tenor, baritone and bass of the boys. They 
sang jubilantly. Their inner souls were expectant. Had not 
they produced more bales of extraordinary cotton this year 
than they had ever done before. Had not they succeeded 
in increasing every other product of the farm to the same 
extent? Last year, they had increased in everything made 
but had just come out even at settling time! Then it was 
that Lamart patted each one of them on the head and told 
them, children as well as parents, to work much harder and 
longer, and to be more particular in the next year, and they 
would come out ahead at settling time, and for once and 
for the first time in their lives and since the Emancipation, 
they would have SOME CASH, SOME REAL MONEY, to 
hold themselves in their own hands, to spend as they 
pleased. They trusted him. He owned everything. They 
took him at his word and they cheerfully and strictly per- 
formed their part of the contract, and were anxious and 
ready, and in a position to demand of him the fullfilment 
of his part of the contract. 

The boys were dressed in jeans and homespun; the 
girls in calico. Their garments were old and much worn, 
but thoroughly laundered. The song they sang expressed 
the motive and purpose of their illiterate, simple, but honest 
lives. Finally, the family procession started to town, driv- 
ing teams that pulled vehicles which legally belonged in a 
manner of form to them, but actually belonged to Lamart, 
who, in his resolute and superior way, controlled not only 
the well fed mules, the wagons, and their valuable market- 
able contents, but the family as well. However, all of them 
were gay and jolly as the procession moved on to town. 
They are the superfine actors in a deep and human tragedy, 
but entirely ignorant of their pathetic and profound parts. 

As the wagons rolled over the highway, sounds that 
ever marked the echoes from the fast falling hoofs of 
thoroughbreds came to their ears. In short time, a hand- 


FAILURE AND DEGRADATION WITH PLENTY 


7 . 


some, massive framed, faultlessly dressed white man, with 
two girls and a boy, were sitting on superb mounts along- 
side of the picturesque procession of simple, trusting, black 
people. 

“Howdy, Pol,” Lamart said as he smiled down on and 
looked over his personal and human property. 

“Marse Bob, I’se reckin we’s done lak you to r us; we's 
done de bes’ we kin; jest de very bes’ we know how; en ef 
us don’t cum out more’n ahead dis settlement, I’m leben off 
farmin and gwiner take de boys en gals where dey ken git 
sum schoolin’; I’ll move to Macon!” 

The iron fibers of Lamart’s leonine face quickly 
changed from a calculating smile of satisfaction to a frown, 
cruelly significant. “I’ll see you Pol down at the ware- 
house.” Giving the reins to his Kentucky horse, he sped 
away in the lead of the bouyant children, who rode with 
him. 

Soon the Negro family followed Lamart’s trail into the 
historic town of Hawkinsville. Lamart had everything pre- 
arranged and knew what was to be the play. 

Lewis had but two distinct things in mind; Lamart’s 
promise, and the fact that for the last twelve months, he 
and every other member of his family had surpassed all 
that had been required of them, so as to get beyond just 
coming even at the end of the farming year. Perfunctorily, 
his grain, freshly slaughtered hogs, cotton and cotton-seed, 
were unloaded from the wagons into the extensive ware- 
house. The mockery of setting down items, adding up and 
balancing were emphasized in the anxious presence of this 
unlettered family of Negroes who thoroughly knew the dif- 
ference between a toad frog and a bull frog, but not the 
difference between the letters “a” and “b.” 

Acknowledgements and statements were made out and 
finally Pollard Lewis and Robert Lamart were called into 
the office and the bookkeeper stated that Lewis had come 


8 . 


THE EXODUS. 


out behind. A look of inexpressible agony and astonish- 
ment on Lewis’s face showed how his heart was being 
wrenched with pain. When his dumbness and silence were 
over he gasped; “God Almighty knows I cain’t never go 
back to dat farm; I jes cain’t stan’ it; its harder dan dyin’ ” 

Lamart clenched his fists and, brandishing them in 
Lewis’s face, said: “Nigger, don’t you think I am going 
to let you run away, owing me money. You git your folks 
back to that farm or I’ll kill and shoot every one of you.” 

Lewis fell upon his knees and with upraised hands im- 
plored: “Don’t Marse Bob. Your daddy, Marse Lucius, 
wasn’t dat mean in slavery time!” 

“Oh hell, Nigger, this aint slavery time. You are free 
now and must pay your debts or be killed. My daddy owned 
you in slavery time. The only way I can get what I want 
out of you is to kill you if you don’t do as I say !” 

It was the old, too often repeated tragedy of the white 
and black life in Dixieland, executed with a spirit of domi- 
nance and vaulted superiority that exceeded the Egyptian's 
enslavement of the Hebrews in the sunny lands and smiling 
valleys of the Pharaohs. God Almighty, through His di- 
vinely created and heavenly sustained agencies of sunshine 
and rain, of wealth and mind, could not have been more 
benignant to Lewis and his family as they toiled and sang, 
hoped and prayed, 

“Inching along, inching along,” 

in full and over-running measures. Disease had not touched 
them. Pestilence had not come nigh their hut. Flood, 
tide, nor drought time had blighted them. Jehovah had 
indeed been their God. 

At the close of this year of surpassing plenty when the 
reward and victory that they hard earned and sought 
seemed within their hands, and their simple, trusting souls 
in glorious anticipation, tasted the sweet recompensation 
of sweat, drudgery, and unshrinking toil, Satan triumphed 


FAILURE AND DEGRADATION WITH PLENTY 


9 . 


through a Southern gentleman of Dixieland, who, in his 
knightly chivalry damned Pollard Lewis by saying: “My 
daddy owned you in slavery time. The only way I can get 
what I want out of you is to kill you, if you don't do as I 
say!" Proud Robert Lamart! Hero of Dixieland! Typi- 
cal Southern gentleman, exemplifying in this Georgia 
bivouac the ancient Mason and Dixie line shibboleth: 

“Naught's a naught, five’s a figger, 

All for the white man, none for the nigger !" 


10 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER II. 

THE CABIN AND THE BIG HOUSE. 

In defense of the barbarities and as excuse for the in- 
justice and tyranny of Dixieland, the whites offer and argue, 
among other flimsy and specious fallacies, the endurance 
and hopefulness of the Negro under the inhuman severities 
heaped on him, that he sings when the white man would 
cry, that he hopes when the white man would despair, that, 
when he fails, he will arise and persevere again, when in 
such cases, the white man destroys himself by committing 
suicide. 

Foibles falore are thus invented by Dixieland’s cabinet 
of astrologers and necromancers for the Pharaohs of the 
Southland, attempting to place their odd section in juxta- 
position with portions of Christendom and the countries of 
the Universe whose principles and usages conform to ad- 
vanced ideas and uplifting standards of ethics, religion, and 
Christianity. Emblazoned on the escutcheon of every clime 
and land are the actual, inner deeds and ideals of the 
people, not the inspired proclamations of their scribes, the 
incantations of their priests nor the divinations of their 
astrologers and necromancers. In spite of such artificers, 
in the despotic and opulent house of Pharaoh or Ahasuerus, 
the Omnipotent will anoint and ordain a Moses or an Esther, 
out of tethered slavery and inexplicable oppression, to lead 
in an Exodus to freedom and to an era of light. So to the 
American Ethiopian, bound to hellish serfdom in the United 
States, God sent as their immortal Light and Sun of this 
truth, heroic Frederick Douglass. The burning oracles of 
his lips and the holy unquenchable flames of his soul in the 
brief space of his eventual fight, consumed in a breath the 
belabored efforts of Dixie’s mightiest antebellum cham- 
pions, as Elijah’s altar devoured the fires of those pagan 
prophets of Baal. 

Antipodal relations and conditions ever exist in a 
land of despotism and tyranny. While the Egyptians 


THE CABIN AND THE BIG HOUSE 


11 . 


basked in the material sunshine of affluence, faring sump- 
tuously and inhabiting the first, great architectural palaces 
of the ages, the more deserving Hebrews, were, by the 
luxurious, superior ruling class of that land allotted the 
difficult and inhuman task of making brick without straw, 
and let it be remembered when we consider certain axomo- 
taic sayings of Dixieland, namely, that the White people 
of the South know best how to deal wisely with the Southern 
Negro, that the master class of Egypt founded their oppres- 
sion of the Hebrew on the decision and precept of dealing 
best and wisely with them. With such a decision and pre- 
cept, human injustice waxed so strong and towering in 
Africa that its debasing and grinding forces beat on the 
lamparts of heaven and the angels, singing their hallelujahs 
to the God of glory, were distressed. Jehovah listened to 
the Hebrews' wails of mortal agony and vividly remembered 
his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

Even more robust with hope, more prolific under afflic- 
tion, and more valiant in degradation was the Ethiopian 
than the Hebrew. For the sighing and wailing of the Jews, 
we have the lullabies and the melodies of the Negro, and 
under Babylonian severities, the harps of the Hebrews were 
hung on willows by the running waters; their souls lost 
hope and their spiritually dried lips refused deliverance. 
They grew desolate and abandoned themselves to calamity. 
In the Southland, the Negro coined songs, rosy and red 
with religious hopes, and sang them with spontaneity and 
inexpressible fervor that carry them in a flood-tide of 
rhythmic beauty resounding through the cycle of ages. 
Their luscious voices were more liquid than the rippling 
cadent waters, through whose valleys and upon whose 
banks they toiled, languished, and bled. 

Robert Lamart returned from Hawkinsville where he 
had just concluded in a mighty and superior manner the 
annual settlement with Pollard Lewis. Pollard Lewis re- 
turned from the same place and settlement, cheated, over- 
powered, and threatened by his mightier and superior op- 


12 . 


THE EXODUS. 


ponent; but in his eyes shone the sun of highest hope, not- 
withstanding the ignominious plight in which he and his 
family lay submerged. 

On a plateau, surrounded by a forest of tall and stately 
Georgia pines, stood the renowned and massive “Big House" 
of Robert Lamart. The plateau rested on the most eminent 
elevation in the county and the “Big House" occupied a 
position on the plateau that commanded a view of the sur- 
rounding lands from all directions and from every angle. 
There was not one of the many Lamart farms that spread 
themselves out for miles in every direction that could not 
be seen from “The Big House." It was a structure fit for 
the home of a king. Its approaches were perfectly laid 
roadways, bordered by lawns and adorned on either side by 
gigantic poplars. After leaving the forest of Georgia 
pines, there was a fine park in which oak, hickory, birch, 
and walnut trees stood in regular order. Settees were at 
convenient distances, and around some of the massive trees. 
A pavillion was situated in the center of the park and there 
was order and symmetry throughout all of the grounds. 
The park extended to the spacious yards which encircled 
“The Big House." The lawns of the yard rose and fell in 
graceful convolutions to the pebble walks that led through 
them to the various entrances of the “Big House," and the 
extensive conservatories in the southern part of the yard 
and the many flower-beds in the eastern part of the yard. 
There was scenic beauty and aesthetic taste in all the ex- 
terior surroundings of the Lamart home. Prince nor queen 
could have desired more artistic or grander surroundings. 

The “Big House" had spreading verandas and huge 
Doric columns on the outside. Within, were spacious 
chambers and rooms, and all of the furniture, ornaments, 
books, portraits, and paintings, were costly and splendid. 

The smiling and serene face of Margaret Lamart, the 
mistress of the “Big House" welcomed home Lamart and 
their three children. 


THE CABIN AND THE BIG HOUSE 


13 . 


The hut of the large Lewis family was a relic of 
Dixie’s much lauded antebellum times. It consisted of a 
vast room and a small shed of a room that was used for a 
kitchen. The family of seven had to sleep in the vast room 
and to eat in the shed-room. It was a log house, with a mud 
and stone chimney on the outside. Time, insects, and the 
elements, had penetrated and punctured the logs in a num- 
ber of places, making gaps. In some places, the gaps were 
covered with mud and in other places with boards. It gave 
the hut a thatched appearance. The house stood forth in 
the field, and the wagon road led almost to its door. Every 
other spot on the farm was under cultivation. Not a flower, 
a twig, plant nor tree dared to invade these premises which 
were absolutely and sacredly dedicated to the bringing 
forth of cotton, corn, potatoes, and peas. The furniture of 
the hut was not only scanty but very rough and rude. 
Every necessary convenience was entirely lacking. Their 
environment and domestic life deeply and truly afforded 
the perplexing and monstrous question of how could they 
live on what they had? Here the seven dwelt, and each 
morning, when they arose, when all the earth about them 
was wrapped in darkness, or illuminated by the light of the 
stars and moon, on swinging open the croaking door of their 
hut, they gazed far away to the prominent elevation where 
a multitude of sparkling lights shone from the Lamart's 
“Big House” that stood at a distance in solemn grandeur. 


14 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER III. 

HOROSCOPE AND HORIZON* 

At the birth of each one of Robert Lamart’s children, 
he had carefully written along with their names the places 
he purposed each of them must fill and the positions that 
they must occupy in life. He had two girls and a boy. For 
both girls, he predestined favorable and fortunate marriages 
with young, aristocratic southerners, wealthy and of slave- 
holding lineage; for Maud, the oldest he selected a lawyer 
for husband, and predicted his rise to eminent judicial sta- 
tion, where he would be honored as judge and be famous 
as jurist; for Margaret, the younger girl, he also desired a 
lawyer, but one whose distinction in his profession would 
not only be at the bar, but who would also shine as favorite 
of the people and become their representative in state and 
national legislative halls, and in the executive authority of 
the Governor of the State; and who finally, in the fullness 
of his years and experience, would attain the dignified and 
venerable honor of being United States Senator. 

But Robert, the boy, the youngest and born last of all 
was the one in whom his father’s fondest hopes centered. 
The glory and luster as well as the greatness and honor of 
the Lamart name rested on him, with its long line of 
achievement in holding slaves before the war and amassing 
stupendeous wealth by the Negroes after the war. Robert, 
his only son, must follow in the footprints of the men of 
the Lamart line and race. He had other children but he 
had never wished anything handsome for them, nor con- 
sidered their future because they were not within the pale, 
having, as well as his white blood, that of the Negro Race! 

All that money could buy to make happy or to arouse 
ambition, Robert Lamart was delighted to bestow on his 
white children. The riches which came down to him, fallen 
to the family coffers by reason of the sufferings and unre- 
quited toils of American black slaves for hundreds of years, 
he multiplied by his avaricious system of carefully planned 


HOROSCOPE AND HORIZON 


15 . 


injustice and relentless oppression and robbery. In spite 
of these things, he excelled in devotion to his wife and 
adoration of his white children; for them, the full category 
of deadly sins would by him be surpassed to insure for 
them the life of ease and luxury and the dominant superi- 
ority that his chivalric nature and noble Southern ambition 
had encompassed. He had taught them with an earnestness 
and fervor more intense and profound than that with which 
he performed the rites of his church, that among all the 
families and names of the Universe, Lamart was the best, 
grandest, and most proud ; that among all the portions and 
sections of the big, round world, the civilization, aristocracy 
and refinement of the South’s Dixieland were first, superior 
and incomparable. He had searched the great European 
cities where lived and worked artists of unique distinctions 
and world-renown, and, seizing on one of peculiarly, rare 
ability and undisputed genius, he hurried him across the 
Atlantic and South to the “Big House,” of the Lamart 
plantations, and at heavy expense retained this artist’s 
wonderful services until the walls and ponderous frames of 
the Lamart gallery were rich and resplendent with the 
beautiful and handsome female and male characters of this 
mighty Southern family. 

The family library was not only massive, but very ex- 
tensive and varied as to the number of books that it con- 
tained, and the subjects that they embraced; and, whenever 
one of the white children would become enrapted with a 
hero depicted in a book, or excited by a valorious character, 
and would run to Robert Lamart to manifest appreciation, 
or to express admiration, he would first take down the 
chronicles of the family history and then, leading his child 
to the family art gallery, he would relate acts, incidents, 
and scenes in the careers of members of the Lamart family 
so exciting, so entrancing, and so thrilling that the child 
would forget Joan of Arc, Juliet, and Cleopatra, in the sur- 
passing admiration that chained soul and mind to the 
Southern heriones of her own family, or lose all thoughts 


16 . 


THE EXODUS. 


and veneration for David, Napoleon, or Hannibal, as heart 
and reverence knitted themselves to and on the glaring 
deeds and heroism of the Lamarts of history, whose actual 
images, in colors of flesh and blood, and in life size form, 
smiled from the walls of a Lamart home, and whose achieve- 
ments were being related to a Lamart by a Lamart. To 
emphasize the depth of the impressions and what added 
an inexpressible charm and realism to it all, was the series 
of extraordinary paintings of Robert Lamart himself, show- 
ing him to perfection when in his fiery youth and at the 
breaking out of the Civil War, when he first donned the 
grey uniform of the Confederacy and received a lieutenant's 
commission; when, bleeding and dying, his faithful Negro 
servant Bob, whose daughter afterwards became his mis- 
tress and bore for him his- firs ^ children, laid him at his 
mother’s feet, on the threshold of the family mansion ; on 
his return to arms, receiving promotion, facing odds and 
fighting glorious battles for the cause he loved and wor- 
shipped; his riding in the staff, a boyish field officer, of the 
General-in-Chief of his lost cause; and standing with Gen- 
eral Robert E. Lee when he surrendered to General U. S. 
Grant at Appomatox Court House. So it was that with 
the Lamart children, Joshua was merely a dead character of 
sacred history; Ceaser a somebody concerning whom they 
must learn to become intelligent, .but their father was to 
them a real hero of Southern life, Lamart blood, and actual 
achievement. 

Thus had there been interwoven in the very blood as 
well as minds, hearts and souls of Maud, Margaret, and 
Robert Beauregard Lee Lamart, Jr., the belief and convic- 
tion that they themselves were of a higher and superior 
order than any other young people anywhere, whether 
those others were the children of the crowned kings and 
queens of the mighty European monarchies, or the children 
of those who fell fighting on historic battle fields to save 
their country and to put down rebellion or to blot out slavery 
and overthrow tyranny. They decided that no limitations 


HOROSCOPE AND HORIZON 


17 . 


existed for them; no barriers to their greatness; no ob- 
structions to their attaining the highest pinnacles of earth- 
ly fame, and, in the midst of such living and thinking, as the 
very base and support of their exalted stations and vaulted 
times, they beheld from the beautiful chambers, galleries 
and parlors of their “Big House,” the bronzed children of 
Pollard Lewis and his brown-face wife, Janey, as they toiled 
in the fields or piled in their hut. 

The five children of Pollard Lewis, as their father be- 
fore them, were born in the rude log hut. There they had 
lived all of their days. They knew nothing of books nor 
paintings and pictures, and had heard but little of wars. 
The only future known to them and different from their 
uneventual life was heaven and God. Their hut, the farm, 
other similar placed Negroes on the farms; Lam-art’s mag- 
nificent “Big House” and the town of Hawkinsville were 
the things that circumscribed their Universe. Their father 
and mother knew some few, other things, but the tasks set 
for them so constantly bound them to never-ending and 
unremitting toil that, when night came, and in rounds of 
succession followed the days, Sleep, sweet Sleep was too 
essential and necessary to be in the least divided or dis- 
pensed with. Scant and simple was their vocabulary, and 
besides their parents, what they did know, although slight 
their knowledge, was supremely dear to them. They knew 
a few, eminent Bible characters: Adam the father of the 
world race; Abraham, Joseph and Moses; also a few other 
Bible characters. Above and beyond all else they knew 
Christ, whom to know and to know aright is life eternal. 

The children of this white and this black family lived 
on the same plantation, in the most glorious and last found- 
ed of the world's republics, the Democracy of whose gov- 
ernment and people are held up as lights to liberty and 
havens from oppression to those of foreign climes across 
broad seas; they lived in calling distance of each other. 
But Dixieland's dominant and superior civilization of the 
South created for the one set a paradise of ease and luxury 
and for the other a hovel of drudgery and ignorance. 


18 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER IV. 

SAXON VERSUS SAXON. 

Some few years prior to the happening of the events 
which have been related in this story, Pollard Lewis found 
himself on a dark night in a dense canebrake that formed a 
part of the famous swamps of Big Buck Creek. Lewis 
knew the canebrakes and swamps thoroughly, and he was 
not possessed with apprehensions of danger, notwithstand- 
ing the many human lives that had been swallowed up in 
the mysteries of the dreaded swamps. Horrifying and ter- 
rible tales had been passed down from one generation to 
another of the squatty bears and wild boars infesting the 
swamps that had either devoured human beings or pursued 
them out into the cleared lands and to the very thresholds 
of their huts. The narratives of those who conquered 
squatty bears, killed wild boars, or made miraculous escapes, 
were the grand epics and sublime iliads of slave-times and 
Negro life on and about the Lamart plantations. 

On this particular night, Lewis wa& startled and halted 
in his tracks by hearing the sounds of rapid gun-discharges, 
and, as he stood in his tracks, he peered forth and K stened. 
His whole being was aroused by tLw appealing shouts of a 
white man’s voice, crying aloud in frenzied tones, “Help! 
help! help! “Lighting his pine-kindling-wood, he hastened 
forward to the spot whence the cries came. There he found 
a stalwart, white man, fighting a squatty bear for his life, 
with an empty Winchester rifle. Lewis at once perceived 
that it was but another case of the often repeated folly of 
courageous white men venturing alone in the Big Buck 
Creek Swamps hunting bear game with only a Winchester 
rifle for a weapon. Drawing his large Bowie knife with 
which he hunted in the swamps, Pollard dealt the blows 
that killed the bear and released the white man. Realizing 
that his life had been saved by Lewis, William Clark, as he 
sat by the camp-fire that night, talked to Lewis as he had 
never before been talked to by a white man. When 


SAXON VERSUS SAXON 


19 . 


they parted at the dawn of the next day, William Clark 
made a pledge of friendship to Pollard Lewis; he told him 
that if he was ever in trouble and it took a white man to get 
him out, to call on him, and, if he was dead, to call on his 
children or any of his kinsfolk. 

Let us not deal with the bitter and sad disappointment 
of the Lewis family when they realized the goal of their 
last year's hard and weary toil was forced indebtedness 
and retention on Lamart' s farm. Each of them, from father 
down to the youngest child, had an inner conviction that 
could not be shaken that each year, for many years past, 
they had come out ahead, but that Lamart had deliberately 
swindled them, and, at the end of the year during which 
they had made most and done their best, to save their lives 
they must remain to work as peons and slaves on Lamart's 
richly yielding farm. In less than a week's time after the 
disastrous and painful settlement at Hawkinsville, at the 
early dawn of a fine Autumn morning, Lamart, booted and 
spurred, rode up to the Lewis cabin and pommelled on the 
door with his riding-whip. The inmates all clustered and 
received Lamart' s fiery orders to get out into the fields and 
pull stalks and clear up for plowing time and a new year's 
planting and harvest. 

For a feW days, the Lewis people laughed and labored, 
sang and toiled, prayed and worked. Finally, at the close 
of a fully occupied day, when clouds spread themselves 
across the heavens and darkness threw a thick and in- 
penetrable mantle of shadows around all things about them, 
they noiselessly crept about and in as silent and swift a 
manner as was possible, took down and packed up their 
humble, scanty belongings, harnessed the mules that they 
had paid for to the wagons they had worked for, and, after 
mid-night, without the utterance of a syllable, they drove 
away from the only home they had ever known. 

Each member of the family was alive to the danger 
that was feared and was keen with anticipation as they 


30 . 


THE EXODUS. 


neared the point where there was a hill, on the top of which 
two roads began. The right one led farther and farther 
away from the Lamart plantations while the left, led deeper 
and deeper into them. They had decided that once beyond 
the fork of the roads at the top of the hill, their escape and 
safety would be assured. Up they went to the crowning 
point of the hill. But, the very instant they reached that 
point, they heard, on both sides of them, in sharp com- 
manding tones, the word “Halt!” They stopped. Muffled 
lanterns were unfurled and revealed to them in the pitchy 
darkness of that strenuous night the forms of Robert 
Lamart, and his son. Robert Lamart, with a gun 
in his hand, stood on their right, and on their 
left stood his son, armed to the teeth, with a 
ponderous shot gun leveled at them. Lamart instructed 
his son to keep the wagons covered. He himself guided 
with his own hands the mules around until they and the 
wagons were headed back to the log hut that Pollard Lewis 
and his family had so gladly deserted. They moved back 
under the brandished guns of Lamart and his son. They 
had left the only rude home that they had ever known too 
gladly. Their return was mingled with sadness and grief 
more poignant than that of those who are the chief mourn- 
ers in a funeral procession. On reaching the cabin, Lamart 
commanded Lewis to unload his scanty goods and place 
them back into the detested hut. When his chattels and 
human property were caged, he and his son proudly rode 
away to their dominant superior life of ease and luxury in 
the “Big House.” 

A few nights after the attempted escape and capture of 
the Lewis family, a form was seen to crawl from under 
their hut wrapped about with a quilt; it rolled and writhed 
across the fields in the rear of the hut for some distance 
and did not stand erect until it was far into the woods. 
That night about midnight, when every member of William 
Claik s family was soundly sleeping, he was awakened from 
his slumbers by loud and persistent knocking at one of the 


SAXON VERSUS SAXON 


21 - 


doors. Springing out of bed hastily, he was soon at the 
door where he demanded: “Who is there?” “It's Pollard 
Lewis,” rang back the answer. At once, the door was 
swung wide open and the midnight knocker and visitor was 
ushered in with a hale and hearty welcome. The entire 
Clark family was aroused from sleep and circled around 
the family hearthstone, where a flowing fire was kindled. 
The family of robust, self-made William Clark heard the 
pitable tale of Pollard Lewis as he graphically related what 
oppression and tyranny he and his family were unequally 
struggling against, and the way he and his entire family 
were being held in peonage and slavery by Lamart on his 
plantation. Clark promised Lewis that he would rescue 
him and his entire family, and secure a good farm and home 
for them ; and he told Lewis that he could pay for them in a 
few years with just half of his profits and with the other 
half he could buy decent and suitable things for his family 
and educate his children. A time was set for the rescue 
and Lewis left the home of the Clarks with a feeling of 
relief and security that he had never before experienced. 

Late in the afternoon of the following day, Lamart 
saw William Clark ride up to the “Big House” over one of 
the approaches very rarely used save by the members of 
his own family and their aristocratic and selected guest. 
Whites of the middle class and men of business knew too 
well his custom to receive them over another road and at 
the office of his mansion set apart for business. To that 
office, there was a front entrance for whites and a rear one 
for Negroes. As soon as he beheld Clark, he inwardly re- 
sented the intrusion. To match and offset the domineering 
and superior airs of the proud and vaulting aristocrat, he 
was met by the boldness and straight-forward openness of 
the self-made man whose free graces and non-chalance de- 
fied the boastful representative of the slave-holding regime. 
To aggravate matters, Clark had a Winchester rifle swung 


22 . 


THE EXODUS. 


across the bow of his saddle, strengthened by two ugly Colt 
revolvers that hung on his hips. 

‘‘Good evening, Colonel Lamart.” 

“How do you do, Mr. Clark ?” 

“All the Clarks are fine, I hope the Lamarts are the 
same.” 

“Fine enough, Clark; and if you will ride around to 
the office, I shall be pleased to learn your business.” 

“We are face to face and man to man right here, Bob 
Lamart, and I tell you that Pollard Lewis is my friend. If 
you don't let him leave your hell-hole of a chain-gang and 
dirty damn slave-pen to-morrow, on the next day every 
white man of Clark blood in the County, will be there to 
get him from under such as you — he and all of his family !” 

“Bill Clark, if you and your damn poor white kinfolks 
trespass on my property, medling with my affairs, enticing 
away my Niggers and breaking the law, I'll shoot you dead, 
same as I would a mad dog, or a bad Nigger. You consider 
that and tell it to your damn poor white kinfolks !” 

“Bob Lamart, if my kinsfolk are poor, it's because they 
are above being rich by cheating and robbing ignorant, 
honest, hard-working Negroes! We'll be on deck day after 
tomorrow, and if we fail to bring Lewis and his family out 
alive, our women folks will get every Lamart as you pass 
the canebrakes! They will be waiting there on horseback 
to kill from ambush if we fail to rescue Lewis and his 
family from your slave-hell ; and if you take blood, you will 
pay back with your own blood!'' 

On finishing this statement, Clark wheeled his horse 
right about and rode away, leaving Lamart standing with 
marble-white face and clenched hands. 

The next day all was quiet. Dusky night, preceded by 
a silent deep shadowed twilight came on. Another new day 
dawned and with it each member of the Lewis family arose 
and through the brilliancy of the rising sun and its golden 
rays looked out toward where the Clarks lived. At mid-day 


SAXON VERSUS SAXON 


23 . 


a band of mounted and armed white men and boys, led by 
William Clark, rode up to the Lewis hut and Clark himself 
bade the Lewises to load their things on the wagons and to 
hitch the teams up at once. This they speedily did and in 
short time the family was ready to leave. 

With armed white youths in front of the wagons in 
which Lewis and his family rode, led by the youngest son 
of William Clark, the procession moved forward, the older 
ones following the wagons, Clark himself riding with the 
hindmost man of all. At the crown of the same high hill 
where the black fugitives had been halted and turned back 
at midnight, when they were stealthily running away, 
Lamart stood like a stature on his thoroughbred Kentucky 
horse, armed to the teeth, his handsome face paled to 
marble whiteness, with his only son and white overseers 
around him. As the Lewis-Clark procession moved on 
toward where Lamart stood at the top of the hill, and 
Lamart was in the act of raising his arms to use his deadly 
weapon a curt and official command broke the tense still- 
ness. “Hands up! in the name of the United States of 
America!” rang into his ears and, infuriated, he glanced 
behind into the barrels of guns held by United States 
deputies. 

“Peonage and slavery are now illegal in this country 
and it is the orders of Judge Emory Spear that Negroes 
must be protected in all of theic legal rights!” 

Leaving Lamart and his gang with their hands held 
aloft under control of United States officers, William Clark 
hastened his daring band of whites and their brown skin 
charges, down, the historic hill, through the deadly cane- 
brakes on the other side of which stood mounted their 
brave heroic women and freedom from Lamart. 


' 24 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER V. 

WINNING HEARTS WITH SONG. 
When Malindy Sings. 


G’way an’ quit dat noise, Miss Lucy 
Put dat music book away; 

What’s de use to keep on trym ? 

Ef you practice twell you’re gray 
You cain’t sta’t no notes a-flyin’ 

Lak de ones dat rants and rings 
From the kitchen to de big woods 
When Malindy sings. 


You ain’t got de natchel o’gans 

Fu’ to make de soun’ come right, 
You ain’t got de funs an’ twistin’s 
Fu’ to make it sweet an’ light. 
Tell you one thing now, Miss Lucy, 
An’ I’m tellin’ you fu’ true, 

When hit comes to real right singm’, 
Tain’t no easy thing to do. 


Easy’ nough fu’ folks to hollah, 

Lookin’ at de lines an’ dots, 

When dey ain’t no one kin sence it, 

An’ de chune comes in, in spots; 

But fu’ real melojous music, 

% Dat jes’ strikes yo’ hea’t and clings, 

Jes’ you stan’ an listen wif me 
When Malindy sings. 


Ain’t you nevah hyeahd Malindy? 

Blessed soul, tek up de cross! 

Look hyeah, ain’t you jokin’, honey? 

Well, you don’t know whut you los’ 
Y’ought to hyeah dat gal a-wa’blin’ 
Robins’ la’ks, an’ all dem things, 
Hush dey moufs an’ hides dey faces 
When Malindy sings. 


Fiddlin’ man jes’ stop his fiddlin’, 

Lay his fiddle on de she’f; 

Mockin’ Bird quit tryin’ to whistle, 
Cause he jes’ so shamed his se’f 
Folks a- playin’ on de banjo 

Draps dey fingahs on de strings — 
Bless yo' soul — fu’gits to move ’em, 
When Malindy sings. 


WINNING HEARTS WITH SONG 


26 . 


She jes’ spreads huh mouf and hollahs, 
“Come to Jesus,” twell you hyeah 
Sinnahs’ tremblin’ steps and voices, 
Timid — lak a — drawin’ neah; 

Den she tu’ns to “Rock of Ages,” 

Simply to the cross she clings, 

An’ you fin’ yo’ teahs a-drappin 
When Malindy sings. 


Who dat says dat humble praises 
Wif de Master nevah counts? 

Heish yo’ mouf, I heagh dat music, 

Ez hit rises up an’ mounts — 

Floatin' by de hills an’ valleys, 

Way above dis bury in’ sod, 

Ez hit makes its way in glory 
To the very gates of God! 

Oh, hit’s sweetah dan de music 
Of an edicated band; 

An’ hit's dearah dan de battles 
Song o’ triumph in de lan’ 

It seems holier dan evenin’ 

When de solemn chu’ch bell rings, 

Ez I sit an’ calmly listen 
While Malindy sings. 

Towsah, stop dat ba’kin’, hyeah me’. 

Mandy, make dat chile keep still; 

Don’t you hyeah de echoes callin’ 

F’om de valleys to de hill? 

Let me listen, I can hyeah it, 

Th’o de bresh of angel’s wings, 

Sof’ an’ sweet, “Swing low, Sweet Chariot,” 
Ez Malindy sings. 


Robert Burns, the Scottish lad, plowing the fields of 
his native heaths and rugged hills breathed into his young 
and imaginative being the aromatic influences of Scotland’s 
wild flowers ; he was born amidst the simplicity of his high- 
land folks and loved their life and knew their soul. When 
his remarkable genius and literary ability gushed forth 
into poetical streams of rhythmic beauty and racial flavor, 
it was indeed the best interpretation and highest expression 
of Scottish lands, tongue, and people. Burns was the 
medium and the gate through which the world during all 
subsequent periods will enter into its enjoyment and pecu- 
liarly rich legacy of Scotland’s treasury of poetry and song. 


26 . 


THE EXODUS. 


In its softest moods, the world now delights to sing the 
bonnie songs, of rugged Scotland. But it was left for Paul 
Lawrence Dunbar, the Negro boy who laughed and toiled, 
who joked and worked to become the most ideal lyric 
creator of all Creation, as he excelled all other poetical poets, 
he eclipsed even Bobie Burns. There could be no more 
graphic nor perpetual refutation of Judge H. B. Abernethy’s 
alleged Tillmanic declaration, ‘‘From the top of his bone- 
head to the bottom of his flat feet, there isn’t a chance to 
educate the Negro, God Almighty made them to be hewers 
of wood and drawers of water, and I am opposed to educat- 
ing them. Booker T. Washington has done more harm in 
Alabama than tuberculosis!”, than that which was given 
when a short lyric of Dunbar’s was flashed on the screen 
of the Strand Theatre of Birmingham. Judge Abernethy 
heartily and vigorously applauded the verses of the Negro 
poet; and what class or set of men is there whose delicacy 
and breadth, altitude, utility, and richness, or thought, sur- 
passes that of the poet? Take from Scotland Edinburgh 
University and her noblest and best educators and leave 
her plow-boy and poet, Bobie Burns, and Scotland still must 
remain incomparable for greatness. Paul Lawrence Dun- 
bar is an eternal wave of curative laughter ; he is a pryramid 
of joy, a heaven of hope and sunshine, an eternity of mirth 
and melody. The luckiest incident about him was he was 
born Ethiopian and an American, the greatest coronets in 
Universal Christendom ! He got drunk, they say, too often, 
and becoming a consumptive died early and is gone from 
the American Negro singers on earth who set the holy 
flames of slave-time melodies burning in his soul. 

There was to be a party of young people at William 
Clark’s spacious but moderately arranged and equipped, 
two-story, frame house, and the younger Clarks, in wisely 
planning for their guest, thought to make the occasion dis- 
tinctive and unique. It was decided that the best feature 
possible was to get the children of Lewis to sing some of 
those charming, melodious songs that had already won 


WINNING HEARTS WITH SONG 


27 . 


perpetual corners in the hearts and minds of the Clark 
family. Accordingly, arrangements were made to have the 
Lewis children serenade the entertainment. 

It was one of those fair, bright, glittering, Southern 
nights that appeared to be a result of Summer flirting with 
the Winter, yielding a caress that developed embraces that 
so mutualized the very best of the two extremists, that the 
severe heat of the one and the intense cold of the other were 
thrown off, leaving an even, balmy influence that made the 
most ideal weather. As the younger generation of whites 
were within merrily chatting, joking and laughing away the 
time, the younger generation of their brown friends 
gathered without and in plaintive sweetness began a Negro 
revival song: 

Gwine to ride up in the chariot, 

(Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine to ride up in the chariot, 

(Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine to ride up in the chariot, 

And I hope to join the band. 

Chorus : 

O Lord, have mercy on me, 

O Lord, have mercy on me, 

0 Lord, have mercy on me, 

And I hope to join the band. 

Gwine to meet my brother there, 

Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine to meet my brother there, 

Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine to meet my brother there. 

And I hope to join the band. 

Gwine walk and talk with Jesus, 

Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine walk and talk with Jesus, 

Sooner in the morning, 

Gwine walk and talk with Jesus, 

And I hope I’ll join the band. 

The singing of this song by the Lewis children captured 
the ears and hearts of the young white people. They 
called for another and another, and the older Lewis girl, 
thinking that they ought not to hold their auditors longer, 


28 . 


THE EXODUS. 


went on the porch where the whites were seated and call- 
ing the Clark girl said: “Miss Lena, fo’ you all go in, 
don’t you want us to sing a song you select for our las 
one?” 

“0 Ida! how find you are, Yes, I’ll have my friends 
make the selection, and as Ida stood with her sisters and 
brothers ready to sing, “SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT” 
was announced. 

At the close of the singing of that song, the colored 
singers were heartily applauded and given many friendly 
cheers. They returned to their new home, bubling over 
with joy. They had entertained and pleased William Clark’s 
children and their company. They knew what he had de- 
livered them from, and they knew too the vast differences 
in their past and present surroundings. 


IN A COTTAGE ON THE HILL 


29 . 


CHAPTER VI. 

IN A COTTAGE ON A HILL. 

The hut which the Lewis family had for a home on 
Lamart’s plantation was situated in a valley, whose farm- 
lands sunk to the canebrakes and noted swamps that in- 
fested the section. Now they were living in a cottage of 
six rooms that rested on a spreading knoll. Around their 
new home were flowers and an orchard of fruit-trees. They 
now had fowls, hogs, and a family milk cow. Their white 
benefactor and friends had seen to all of these things for 
them. The scanty and rude household goods brought from 
the Lamart hut had been discarded and, under the super- 
vision of Clark, more adequate and comfortable furnishings 
were secured. They had entered a new era where they 
found a new life and for the first time were enjoying some 
of the real benefits and blessings that belong to a free 
people. 

Among the things that had come into their new life 
to cheer and encourage them was the association they had 
with other colored people. Such privilege and opportunity 
had been denied them before as Lamart had absolutely 
forbidden and prohibited intercourse and visiting among 
the Negro tenants, who upheld him as the most powerful 
and wealthy of Southern land-owners. Under the avaricious 
and iron rigors of his heartless system, they only knew 
hard and unrequited toil and a wretched existence in the 
weather-torn hovels that he allowed them. But best of 
all they could now go to church and worship Almighty God 
when it pleased them. 


30 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER VII. 

HOW WHITES TAUGHT BLACKS. 

The beautiful and melodious singing of the plantation- 
songs and Christian jubilees and revivals appealed so 
strongly to the old as well as the young members of the 
Clark family, that they. did what they could to have the 
children of Lewis sing to them. Pollard Lewis and every 
member of his family were so grateful for what William 
Clark had done for them that they sought every way that 
they could find to manifest their appreciation. Both whites 
and Negroes were striving for the same laudable ends and 
objects. Clark and his entire family considered themselves 
in debt to the Negro family and sacredly obligated to do 
them every good service available, on account of William 
Clark being rescued from a horrible death when Lewis 
saved him from the cruel jaws of a squatty bear in the 
Big Buck Creek canebrakes. On the other hand, Pollard 
Lewis, his wife, Janie, and every one of the children looked 
upon William Clark as their emancipator and savior, and 
on each of his family as having had a big and active part 
in what had been accomplished by their deliverance from 
the slavery of Lamart’s dominance. The Clark children felt 
that their part of repaying their great debt to the Lewis 
family was too insignificant and small; they wanted to do 
more. 

“Beulah, I shall never be satisfied until I can do some- 
thing really tangible in benefiting the Lewises.” “Well, it 
appears to me, Lena, that father and mother are getting 
all the joys of serving them. It seems there is only a very 
little that we can do. What makes it hard to me is how 
they love to do things for us, and I bet that their parents 
have instructed them not to take anything from us for 
what we get them to do; it is utterly impossible for me 
to get Ida or Rebecca to take one penny of what I offer 
them in money.” 

As they sat on their front porch, knitting and thus 


HOW WHITES TAUGHT BLACKS 


31 . 


talking, the clatter of horses announced the approach of 
their brothers, Bill and Jim. “Let's ask the boys for ad- 
vice," they said in unison. 

The family partook of the dinner set before them. 
Soon after dinner, Bill and Jim were about to leave the 
house when Lena said, “Bill, you and Jim come out on the 
porch for a little talk with Beulah and myself." As the 
Negro children played, sang their heart touching songs, 
and worked, their white friends, the children of their bene- 
factors, advised, planned, and thought to cheer, encourage, 
and reward them. 

“Well, girls, talk fast; we are in a hurry to get to 
business and work. What's the idea, what's up now — an 
entertainment, funeral or marriage?" 

“Bill, we have been talking and thinking about the 
Lewis girls, Ida and Rebecca, and we hardly know what to 
do and how to begin to help them more than what we 
are now doing." 

“Well," said Jim, “If the feminine branch of the Clark 
family has turned missionary, as a good Baptist, I shall 
hold up the male side and, in obedience to John's preaching 
in the wilderness of Judea, I shall aid in our bringing forth 
worthy fruit. You girls remember the ancient but service- 
able proverb, ‘where there’s a will, there's ever a way.' " 

“We know there is a way," answered Lena, “but we 
can not find the way, and that is why we have asked you 
to find it or show us how to find it." 

“I suggest that you get the girls acquainted with Sun 
day School, and when you feel sure of them, get them off 
on Sundays to the more advanced and fortunate Negroes 
who are having Sunday School." 

“Oh ! that is really fine, Billy," shouted both girls. “We 
shall proceed to work along that line just as early as 
possible." 

In the course of a few weeks, under the tutelage of 


32l 


THE EXODUS. 


their intelligent, white instructors, Ida and Rebecca had 
mastered the alphabet and made fine headway in acquiring 
sufficient words to do rudimentary reading. As time pro- 
gressed, the white girls pulled the Negro girls up, and the 
Negro girls in turn pulled their black brothers onward both 
in reading and writing. Finally, the Clark children decided 
that the Lewis children were far enough on in reading to 
go forth to Sunday School where the Negro children of the 
more advanced and fortunate gathered each Sunday to 
study the Bible and have emphasized to and before them 
the beautiful and holy lessons contained in that greatest 
book of the many, many books of the Universe, the Holy 
Bible. 


THEIR CHRYSALIS BROKEN 


33 . 


CHAPTER VIII. 

THEIR CHRYSALIS BROKEN. 

The spring came, the beautiful spring, and the most 
glorious of all other seasons, and the most balmy spring of 
all other climes is that of the sunny South. The canebrakes 
were fragrant with the perfumed breath and sweet odors 
of honeysuckle and wild sweet shrubs. The out-of-door 
world had thrown off its old and sombre winter garments, 
and dale and hill were exhilarating all whom their soothing 
influences embraced. The spring gushed forth with new 
bright, and fanciful adornments, and remained a “Sweet 
Sixteen,” until she died. There is nothing full and matured, 
solemn apd heavy about Miss Spring; she is a young Miss 
and ever maintains the freshness of youth and the most 
lightsome joyousness. 

Spring time found the Lewises a changed and newer 
family. They most gladly and joyously went about their 
work, but they had a different mood than what had been 
theirs on Lamart’s farm, when they were living in his 
hovel of a hut. Their present surroundings gave a new 
world to them. It pointed onward and upward; it had 
voices that sang to them of better and brighter days and 
things ; the very air about them seemed resonant with hope, 
and the tendency of their affairs bade them to struggle with 
the expectancy of recompense and reward. The same, true 
white friends who had rescued them from peonage and 
slavery had also seen to their having a fine farm and home, 
and the younger whites had instructed them in reading and 
writing. And now they were attending Sunday School and 
church with many others of their Race, and enjoying a 
fellowship and association that they never dreamed of 
while they dragged out their grinding existence on Lamart’s 
valley farm. Their fondest dreams had never touched the 
border of this glorious and golden elevation. 

On reporting at Sunday School in early April, they 
were invited to participate in the May Day Exercises. 
They inquired about the exercises and, when they returned 


34 . 


THE EXODUS. 


home, it was decided that Ida would go to the Clarks and 
secure advice and aid from Lena and Beulah. Ida hastened 
to the Clarks and explained her mission to Lena and Beulah. 
They told her that they had attended the May Day Exercises 
of the Colored people as visitors and knew how they were 
carried out; that, in their opinion, the thing for the Lewises 
to do was to let the girls coniine themselves for the present 
to aiding in the singing; that their oldest brother, Fred, 
might be able to recite ; that they would ask their brother, 
Bill, to get a fine speech for him. The Lewis children did 
just what the Clark children told them to do. As they 
merrily worked in barn and field, their rich voices resounded 
the songs which they were to help in singing on May Day. 
Early in the morning, out in the barn, and at night when 
the day's work was done, Fred's voice could be heard 
practicing the recitation on which Bill Clark was drilling 
him. 

Finally the first day of May came. A grand, magnifi- 
cent, and sublime day. It was custom among the Negroes 
of the Southern Section to have a big Union Sunday School 
Picnic on this day. All the Sunday Schools met in an ex- 
pansive, spreading grove and carried out a program in the 
morning. Then the tables were literally loaded down and 
piled up with a large variety of the very best of food, and 
the Sunday School children grouped around the tables to 
feast on the rare eatables and delicacies set before them. 
What child could ever forget that day? 

The Lewis family had never heard of or seen such a 
grand and pleasing occasion before. Their interest was 
deeper and their appreciation keener than the rest. They 
felt and believed that they owed all of their present enjoy- 
ments to the Clarks. When they arrived in the morning, 
in those charming and picturesque groves where the May 
Day Exercises were to be held, their intense pleasure vied 
with the feelings of astonishment and surprise that took 
hold of them. Great throngs of children, attended by older 
people, seemed everywhere. When the band marched to 


THEIR CHRYSALIS BROKEN 


36 . 


the Grand Stand, thither the multitude hastened. Ida and 
Rebecca joined the chorus of girls who were to sing. Fred 
was told to line up near the stand and be ready to mount 
the platform to recite his selection when his name was 
called. The Lewises had not observed the Clarks were 
present occupying a position in their carriage near the 
Grand Stand where they could see and hear everything 
that transpired. The Chairman of the Day espying William 
Clark, profusely thanked him for his attendance and in- 
vited him to act as judge with two of the leading ministers 
who would decide whom the prizes would be given as the 
best speakers. Prizes were to be awarded, one to the best 
girl-speaker and the other to the best boy-speaker of the 
day. 

With the selection of the judges, the performance of 
the program was entered on. It was an exciting occasion 
to all. In close proximity to the stage, Bill and Jim Clark 
stood by their saddled horses, waiting and watching to be- 
hold the results and success of their training of Fred. 
They had given Fred a prodigiously big speech on a momen- 
tous subject, punctuated with grand words, but he had 
taken to it as a hog takes to eating corn. “The AMERICAN 
FLAG,” the chairman announced, “will now be recited by 
Frederick Douglass Lewis. 

“When Freedom, from her mountain height, 

Unfurled her standard to the air, 

She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there; 

She mingled with its gorgeous dyes 
The milky baldric of the skies, 

And striped its pure celestial white 
With streaking of the morning light; 

Then, from her mansion in the sun, 

She called her eagle bearer down, 

And gave into his mighty hand, 

The symbol of her chosen land. 


36 . 


THE EXODUS. 


Majestic monarch of the cloud; 

Who reared aloft thy regal form, 

To hear the tempest trumpings loud, 

And see the lightning-lances driven, 
When strive the warriors of the storm, 
And rolls the thunder drums of heaven — 
Child of the sun! to thee 'tis given 
To guard the banner of the free, 

To hover in the sulphur smoke, 

To ward away the battle-stroke, 

And bid its blendings shine afar, 

Like rainbows on the cloud of war, 

The harbinger of victory! 


Flag of the brave! thy folds shall fly, 

The sign of hope and triumph high, 

When speaks the signal-trumpet tone, 

And the young line comes gleaming on: 

Ere yet the life — blood warm and wet 
Has dimmed the glistening bayonet, 

Each soldier eye shall brightly turn, 

Where the sky-born glories burn, 

And, as his springing steps advance, 

Catch war and vengeance from the glance; 
And when the cannons mou things loud 
Heave in wild wreaths the battle shroud, 
And gory sabers rise and fall, 

Like shoots of flame on midnight's pall; 
Then shall thy meteor glances glow, 

And cowering foe shall sink beneath 
Each gallant arm that strikes below 
That lovely messenger of death. 


Flag of the seas! on ocean wave 
Thy stars shall glitter o'er the brave! 
When death, careering on the gale, 
Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail, 
And frightened waves rush wildly back 
Before the broadside’s reeling back, 
Each dying wanderer of the sea 
shall look at once to heaven and thee, 
And smile to see thy splendors fly 
In triumph o'er his closing eye. 


THEIR CHRYSALIS BROKEN 


37 . 


Flag of the free, heart’s hope and home 
By angels hands to valor given; 

Thy stars have lit the welcome dome, 

And all thy hues are bom in heaven. 
Forever floats that standard sheet! 

Where breathes the foe, but falls before us, 
With freedom’s soil beneath our feet, 

And freedom’s banner streaming o’er us. 


When Frederick ended the first four lines with the 
word “there, ” taking his eyes, his large ponderous hands, 
and ringing, clear, melodious voice from the beautiful skies 
where he had cast them, he threw them on the people and 
into their hearts and they responded with loud applause 
and wild enthusiasm, emphasizing their patriotic joys. 
When he finished and left the Grand Stand, old people were 
crying; others were throwing their handkerchiefs high into 
the air, seized by exalted feelings of national pride and 
racial happiness; and even the tender young children 
clapped their hands together in juvenile delight. Frederick 
had won. From peonage and slavery on the fertile fields 
of Lamart's plantations, he had met in an unhindered and 
non-restricted field, face to face, that for which the Ameri- 
can continent was peopled and the United States of America 
was established, CHANCE and OPPORTUNITY, and had 
proven his worth. He hurried from the Grand Stand and 
was hastening to the spring to secure cool water to quench 
his thirst, to cool his brains, and to make calm his excited 
emotions, when he was seized by Bill and Jim Clark. 

“Fred, you are O. K. ; we are going to take you straight 
as a bee line to Hawkinsville. Now no objections; if you 
object, we will take you vi et armis; we are going to dress 
you up in the very best suit of clothes that they have in 
that town.” “VI ET ARMIS” repeated Fred. “Is that 
something glorious about the country, Bill?” he asked. 

“Well, yes, in a way, Fred, but you'll come to it some 
day and understand. 

That evening Fred returned home and found the family 


38 . 


THE EXODUS. 


waiting for him. Pollard Lewis, grasped his son violently 
and drew him to his bosom, and held him caressingly in his 
rugged, strong arms. “My boy!” he cried. “An Fve lived 
to be sho’ ’nuf free, an’ to see you do sich, an' you neber 
been inside uv a school. God kno’s whut you an' the tuther 
chulluns wud do, Fred, ef you had CHANCES an' cud go to 
school!” And the old man patted his hands together and 
wept. 


ALABAMA— TALLADEGA— TUSKEGEE 


39 . 


CHAPTER IX. 

ALABAMA— TALLADEGA— TUSKEGEE. 

The occasion of the May Day Exercises was a new mile- 
stone in the education and progress of the Lewis family. 
Fred’s triumph before the large assembly of young and 
older people kindled burning and holy flames in his soul. 
The advanced and more fortunate of the colored people 
formed ties of friendship with the family. This led to all 
of the Lewis children entering the public school for its brief 
summer term continuing their studies when the inadequate 
and rudimentary school provided for Negro children was 
accessible to them. 

On account of the instruction given to them by the 
Clarks, they did not have to start in as beginners, not even 
Pollard the youngest. Once in school, each one of them 
made astonishing and rapid progress in the limited branches 
taught. Their teachers were greatly elated at the precocity 
and aptitude that they displayed for learning knowledge, 
the bread of life, and they were particularly interested in 
the two older boys, Frederick and Theodore. These two 
boys led all the other students of the school in being courte- 
ous, polite, and obedient. They learned their lessons better 
and more thoroughly and had an ease and readiness of 
assimilating and understanding the things proposed and 
told them that characterized the average or the majority 
of the other students. 

In the course of time, the two teachers called on the 
parents, and Pollard Lewis and his wife, Janie, not only 
appreciated the thoughtfulness of the teacher, but both of 
them wept when they learned that the mission of the 
teachers was to encourage them to send their two older 
boys, Frederick and Theodore, to College and a Trades 
School. The teachers proposed that in the Fall Frederick 
be sent to Talladega College, on account of his unmistakable 
marks of refinement, his ready grasp and thorough com- 
prehensions of his subjects, his fluency of speech, his deep 


40 . 


THE EXODUS. 


and enthusiastic patriotism, purity of thought, lofty ideals, 
and unquestionable courage and bravery ; and that Theodore 
be sent to Tuskegee Institute on account of his application 
to every minute point of any task alloted him; his perfect 
politeness and obedience; his love for mechanical pursuits 
and out-door life, his broad and generous concern in and 
regard for the rights of others, and his unassuming and 
simple nature. The teachers pledged themselves to the 
task of securing funds to aid them in beginning careers at 
Talladega College and Tuskegee Institute. 

The Negro teachers of the Southland are among its 
noblest and most valuable assets. Hardly ever half-paid, 
in the majority of cases forced to teach double allotments 
of children in inadequate, dilapidated, and forlorn struc- 
tures, many of which are often such that the white people 
in their vicinities would not use to house their cattle and 
stock in. Yet they cling and stick to their tasks with a 
patriotic fervor, undying patience, and constant zeal not 
surpassed by any other class of public servants. The 
teachers in the secondary schools and colleges for Negro 
education and training in the South, immediately after the 
Civil War, were of the highest and noblest type of civil and 
Christian manhood and womanhood. They were liberal in 
their views and of thorough education; had the loftiest 
national and universal ideals, pure motives, were unselfish, 
and not cowards. This class of white people have rendered 
the most inestimable superior economic, moral, and spiritual 
services to the South, this nation, and humanity, than any 
other class of white people. As monuments to their ideals 
and purposes, Talladega College and Tuskegee Institute 
stand forth the great and pure lights of high and industrial 
education for Negroes in the State of Alabama. 

Equidistant from Maine to Texas, near the center of 
Negro population in the United States, surrounded by the 
mining and industrial South, is located TALLADEGA 
COLLEGE, at Talladega, Alabama. The location is indeed 
beautiful for situation and healthful in climate. Established 


ALAB AM A— TALLADEGA— TUSKEGEE 


41 . 


in 1867, it has well sustained the aims of its founders in 
training leaders for intellectual, spiritual, and industrial 
activity; it has consistently presented ideals for a refined 
and wholesome home-life and for the development of Chris- 
tian citizenship. Its central and oldest building was named 
in honor of General Wager Swayne who served in the Union 
Army during the Civil War. He purchased the building 
for the American Missionary Association that sustains 
Talladega College. This building stands on a lofty emi- 
nence, in the center of a sweeping and broad campus, and 
looks over the entire City of Talladega and out over the 
valleys and upon the mountains that encircle that city. It 
was to this College that Frederick Douglass Lewis went to 
prepare himself to fullfil an honorable and worthy destiny. 

About the time Talladega College was founded, General 
Armstrong, brother officer of General Swayne in the Union 
Army, began at Hampton, Virginia, the famous Hampton 
Institute. It was some years later that Booker T. Wash- 
ington came to General Armstrong and Hampton Institute. 
Concerning his work at Tuskegee, the perfect consecration 
and devotion that he gave to it, and Tuskegee Institute's 
rise and success under his administration, are facts that 
claim an entire book, and not a casual mention herein. But 
it was to this famous school and to be under this beneficient 
and worthy teacher and leader that Theodore Roosevelt 
Lewis left the farm and his home in Georgia where his 
heart was knit in urudying love to the members of his family 
and in lasting gratitude to white people who had rescued 
his entire family from peonage and slavery, as well as to 
his colored teachers and friends whose mites, contributed 
in patriotic spirit of rare unselfishness, made it possible for 
him to enter Tuskegee Institute. 

Their inate love for hard and laborious toil was not 
left at home but each took it to his higher preparation in 
Alabama, and one at Talladega, and the other at Tuskegee, 
with faculty and among students, the name, Lewis, gained 
honor and won respect. It did not take an Isaiah nor an 


42 . 


THE EXODUS. 


Elijah, divinely endowed with foresight and prophecy, to 
foretell that Frederick Douglass Lewis, prize speaker and 
honored student of Talladega College, has as much a part 
of him as his bone and blood, a thirst for beneficient in- 
telligent service, an unselfish ambition to excell in work 
for his country, his race, and his God ; that Theodore Roose- 
velt Lewis was a living example and shining light of 
accuracy, diligence, honesty, and practical endurance. 

On a certain occasion at Tuskegee Institute, the world’s 
greatest teacher and prophet of industrial education, with 
that deep and profound desire of his to thoroughly drive 
home to his pupils and desciples the most practical and 
simplest ways of perfectly mastering any problem or task, 
by the actual accomplishment and the doing of the thing 
aimed to be taught, put a test of hard and patient endurance 
to the senior class in mechanics of which Theodore Roose- 
velt Lewis was a member. 

‘‘Now boys,” said Booker T. Washington, “I know you 
have already put much overtime in on this model, and that 
each and every one of you has done more than has been 
asked of you to get this model ready for exhibit tomorrow 
when the Chicago-Cincinnati Special brings to Tuskegee 
Institute Mr. Rosenwald, the brother of Ex-President Taft, 
and other benefactors and leaders of the nation. I join in 
with your instructor in thanking you for what you have 
done, but somehow I cannot get it away from me, nor out 
of my mind, that you boys who are soon to be graduated 
form Tuskegee Institute, have, or will find, means or a way 
to have the model ready to be exhibited tomorrow.” 

“Mr. Washington!” sang out a loud voice, firm and 
clear. 

“What is it, Roosevelt?” inquired the principal of Tus- 
kegee Institute. Booker T. Washington always preferred 
to call him “Roosevelt” in speaking to him, as he held that 
name in highest regard. 

“It will only take one boy to finish it tonight, if he con- 


ALABAMA-TALLADEGA— TUSKEGEE 


43 . 


tinues right on at it and chooses to miss his supper and the 
social for students, in Alabama Hall; please permit me to 
do it! 

Tears immediately trinkled down the brown and fur- 
rowed cheeks of that tall and gigantic leader of men who 
had initiated so many soul tests, who had stood the trial of 
so many fiery and strenuous scenes, maintained equilibrium 
and poise before vast multitudes, crowned heads of Europe, 
and our Presidents and their cabinets, but he faltered and 
gasped before the unselfishness, this knightly nobility, so 
unconsciously manifested by the erstwhile peon and slave 
of proud, rich Robert Lamart. The principal gave his con- 
sent and hastened away, but the members of the senior 
class shouted loud huzzas and hurriedly elected Theodore 
Roosevelt Lewis to the highest honors of their class. 

The same high honors and merited respect that Theo- 
dore received at Tuskegee fell to Frederick at Talladega. 


44 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER X. 

IN THE GREAT, BIG FREE NORTH. 

Fred found himself a college graduate but without any 
money. After fervent, earnest, and careful study, he chose 
to prepare himself for the legal profession and went to 
work at hard and severe toil in the mineral district near 
Birmingham to earn money to get North. In the South 
there were a number of Law-Schools and the peoples’ gov- 
ernment of the democratic south very liberally and wisely 
provided State Universities where all of the learned profes- 
sions and scientific branches were taught in regular courses 
that led to graduation and degrees. These institutions in 
the Southland are carried on and supported by direct ap- 
propriations from the state’s treasuries; and the State 
treasuries of each one of the Southern States has its coffers 
filled by a system of revenue and taxation made on each and 
every inhabitant and resident and all the property within 
the domain without any regard to color, creed, or previous 
condition of servitude. But the doors of every State Uni- 
versity in the South are closed to Negroes. The Race to 
which Frederick and Theodore belonged must pay the same 
proportion of taxes ; must give higher degrees of obedience 
bnd respect to the laws; must be more careful to perform 
every duty and obligation imposed by the Government, but 
they are prohibited from each and every branch of each 
and every State University of the South; hence, Frederick 
had to go North to study law. So the early autumn found 
him at Boston, the Hub of the great, big, FREE NORTH. 
He was among strangers, in a colder and more severe 
climate. He had but a little money. It was a difficult task 
for him to go through his first year in the Law School of 
the University. He got through, owed no one, maintained 
good health, had an excellent rating as student, and gained 
many new friends. It was the country of many CHANCES 
and OPPORTUNITIES for the person who was willing 
to do. 


IN THE GREAT, BIG FREE NORTH 


45 . 


Fred realized that he had entered a new and different 
story in the higher reaching house of his life, for life in 
Boston abounded in good and helpful things. If at any 
time, he got entirely out of money and had a bill soon to 
fall due, there was always a job waiting him where he 
could quickly earn the needed money. The libraries were 
always free, accessible, and open. The same was true of the 
parks Affairs in Boston approached the American ideal 
and he grew more and more appreciative of his birthright 
and nativity. He was astonished and marveled at the 
places of historic interest and national significance. The 
Boston Commons, Fanuel Hall, the Cradle of American 
Liberty and Independence, Christ Church, one of the most 
remarkable and oldest buildings of the city, and the one 
from the steeple of which Paul Revere hung his signal. 
There were statues of historic national characters. All of 
these things inspired and instructed him. 

The Winter came during which cold winds blew on him 
and sleet and snow fell all about him and in great amounts 
and for long periods of time. He was altogether unaccus- 
tomed to such severe and trying weather. To meet the 
cold and howling winds he dressed in heavier clothing, wore 
heavier shoes, and walked brisker and more erect. He 
thought out the best method of preserving his health under 
the changed conditions and in a short while he became 
acclimated and found that the more severe climate of the 
North was more conducive to constant work, was more 
bracing to both body and mind, gave better health and 
finer disposition, and that it suited an intelligent and vigor- 
ous career more than his native Southland. He became 
awakened to the fact that he could walk distances in less 
time than it took him to walk the same distances in the 
South; that both in muscular ability and activity and in 
mental endeavors, he had increased in efficiency and effec- 
tiveness. He looked about him and beheld the results of 
the advanced ideas and great achievements of the times. 
Such stood forth in towering skyscrapers, great stores and 


46 . 


THE EXODUS. 


•*r 


magnificent hotels, and palatial homes. At the water-front, 
in the Boston harbor great boats came in laden with freight 
and crowded with passengers from all the seas and from 
every clime. There were brilliantly lighted streets upon 
which he strolled at night, and there stretched out in pic- 
tursque beauty the broad, wide streets of Boston. 

This former peon and slave compared the GREAT, 
BIG FREE NORTH, in whose most educational and liter- 
ary city he was struggling, preparing himself to be able 
to fill and occupy a high and useful position in life that he 
too might have His PLACE in the Sun that AMERICAN 
CHANCES and OPPORTUNITY afforded, to the wretched 
hut where he and his family were duped and forced to live 
a life of drudgery and slavery that Robert Lamart might 
maintain his dominant superiority. 


THE NATIONS BIRTHDAY— A DAINTY MAIDEN 


47 . 


CHAPTER XI. 

THE NATION’S BIRTHDAY— A DAINTY MAIDEN. 

In a way, on the 4th day of July, our American Nation 
was born. The 4th day of July is not only a national holi- 
day with and for all of our people, but it is an American 
custom, a peculiarly and real American event, and best and 
richest of American, jubiliant feast days. Fred had learned 
more and more about the 4th day of July since leaving the 
hovel and drudgery of Robert Lamart's River Bottom farm. 
He had read about the occasion, heard others talk of it, 
and had himself participated in some rather week celebra- 
tions of it before coming North. But it took a trip North 
to give him an enthusiastic, fiery, live, real, and strong 4th 
day of July! He had secured for the vacation and summer 
months employment with the Canadian Pacific Railway 
Company. This allowed him to travel out of Boston to 
Montreal and from there to the principal cities and historic 
and scenic places of Canada and the Northern and Eastern 
parts of the United States. 

It was on one of his trips to Buffalo, when he had an 
all day stop over that he had his first great 4th day of July. 
Language is inadequate to express the holy and patriotic 
emotions that controlled and possessed him. For the first 
time in his life, he beheld in militant array the gray and 
silver-haired heroes of the Grand Army of the Republic; 
those proud boys in blue who fought and saved the glorious 
Union from being rent in twain, effecting at the same time 
the emancipation from chattel slavery 4,000,000 human be- 
ings. In the procession, marched the United States Regu- 
lars from Fort Niagara, easily distinguished from the rest 
cn account of their superior soldiery appearance ; their erect 
and graceful, military bearing and swing, and military 
oneness and the solidarity of their lines. There were en- 
signs, guidons and buntings; prize flags and trophies from 
Rebel lands; flowing flags and regimental standards, and 


48 . 


THE EXODUS. 


every other requisite to make up the trappings and wieldy 
things of a great army that has been to war. 

These things charmed and amused Fred; the thorough 
patriotic spirit of the occasion exalted him, the perfect 
accord and national unity shown alike in paraders and 
spectators. It was a day of grand and sublime jubilations; 
not visected with frolic nor attenuated with fun ; there was 
reverence and sacredness even in the lusty shouts and glad 
huzzas that burst forth at every corner and station. Every 
one seemed to be a part of the national festival and Fred 
himself felt that he was as much a part of it as any one 
of those who rode or marched in the parade. 

When the long parade had winded itself down Main 
Street and the vast concourse of people that were jammed 
and packed together nearly everywhere began to pull apart 
from the crowd and to separate, Fred’s memory fled back 
to scenes of his isolated existence with the loved ones of 
his family on the unforgetable River Bottom farm of aristo- 
cratic and proud Robert Lamart; he thought seriously of 
his dear ones who had toiled so hard and faithfully down 
there. In his deep thinking and being carried away far 
into the heart of his own sad Dixieland, he forgot the 
parade, the playing of bands and their thrilling music; the 
loud, mighty cheers of the celebrators; his whole being and 
mind were concentrated in profound revery on the long and 
weary days of sweat and toil by himself, father, mother, 
sisters, and brothers, striving to meet the requirements of 
rich and superior Robert Lamart, so they could come out 
ahead, could get some cash of their own, to hold in their 
hands, some ready money that they might spend as pleased 
them. He was so absorbed in his revery that he unwittingly 
pushed himself away from the throng and followed a walk 
• that led into a beautiful park circle, in which there towered 
towards the sky a monument of a Union General of the 
Civil War. He had passed off the walk and was treading 
down the pretty flowers that adorned the well-kept beds of 
the park circle. “Mister, you are walking upon the flowers/' 


“Mister you are walking upon the flowers,” warned a softly modulated, round toned and musical 
voice.” ‘‘Beg pardon Miss, it was not my purpose to walk on the flowers 





































































% 


' \ 


THE NATIONS BIRTHDAY-A DAINTY MAIDEN 


49 


warned a softly modulated, round toned and musical voice. 
“Beg pardon, Miss, it was not my purpose to walk on the 
flowers; they ever claim from me as tender care and cour- 
tesy, the adoration and respect that human flowers, that I 
delight to honor always get, and pardon me for saying, 
Miss, that you seem a most worthy queen of the race of 
human, and particularly the gentler and most rare species 
of the race of human flowers!” 

“Gee!” Fred heard her say as he raised his hat and 
bowed to her with love in his eyes and his heart in his 
hand, and most rightly so, for our brown-face Dixieland 
lad now looked on the prettiest and daintiest brown-faced 
maiden that he had ever before seen. 

“You speak so strangely and as you speak nicely,” she 
said, “but my sisters are calling to me and I must go ; I ran 
over here just to save you a free holiday ride to prison for 
tramping down our city flowers.” 

Fate and Love, Life and Sunshine were also on the 
arena and were now knocking at the door of our brown 
hero’s heart on the 4th day of July, and although once 
peon and slave, he was too thoroughly man and knight not 
to pick up the challenge that Cupid threw down to him. 
“Before you do go, please let me know the name of my 
kind benefactress! 

A pair of deep, clear pretty, dark-brown eyes gazed up 
into Fred’s face. 

“Well, come over there with me while I join the others. 
I shall allow my sister to give you my name, when she does 
the introducing. She is fine on talking, going to marry a 
lawyer soon, she is getting ready to be at par with him.” 

“Why, I am to be a lawyer,” exclaimed Fred, “I am 
now at the College of Law of the University at Boston !” 

“Oh my! they will think that I have been husband 
hunting,” she exclaimed. 

Fred gave the young woman his card and she pre- 


50 . 


THE EXODUS. 


sented him to the older sister who introduced him to the 
young women whom he and his benefactress faced, and, 
thinking that Fred knew her younger sister's name she 
stopped, but the young woman said with peculiar earnest- 
ness, “Say introduce me too, he must know my name!" 

The party soon began strolling away. The young 
woman who had warned him to watch the flowers and who 
had so quickly drawn into his being and soul a life time 
interest, had a girl on either side of her and, with a smile 
on her lips, seemed about to leave him. It appeared as if 
an undiscovered and unexpected world of sunshine and ages 
of joy had suddenly flooded his life with sweetness and 
brightness and in an instant was as quickly going away 
from him to be forever lost. In the iron grasp of his first 
passionate love affair and great, rising sea of true emotions, 
Fred seemed lost to himself. They were almost out of the 
circular park, a beautiful bunch of extraordinary and rare 
pretty girls plainly showing the graces and refinement of 
birth and life in a free state of free schools, free libraries, 
free art galleries, free museums, and free parks for all 
without regards to color, creed, or previous condition of 
servitude. Taking off his hat, he allowed a sympathetic 
breeze to play on his forehead, and, marching gallantly up 
to the three girls, the center one being Miss Thelma Mar- 
shall, his new acquaintance and his first love, he implored, 
“Excuse me, please, I don't get to Buffalo often; and may 
never get here again, and I beg just a few words with 
Miss Marshall!" 

“My sister who talks so well, you mean?" was the 
rebuff. 

“Oh no, I mean you who are so kind!" 

Down the sweeping stretches of Michigan avenue the 
two strolled, handsome brown son of the South, and a 
beautiful brown maiden of the North. Their eyes talked 
love and their breath inhaled its sweetness. His high aims 
and lofty ideals met ready response from the pure heart 


THE NATIONS BIRTHDAY-A DAINTY MAIDEN 


51 . 


and mind of this Virgin whose chaste bosom heaved as 
she sat on the family porch in the presence of her man of 
dreams, her first and only hero. She told him that she 
had been graduated from the City High School of Buffalo 
and that she longed to teach the children of her race where 
teaching was most lacking, and needed. “Well, that’s down 
on Lamart’s River Bottom,” said Fred. She also told him 
that she was now employed as an Assistant Librarian in 
the City Library. Fred left her with his hopes and heart 
bounding to her, this dainty brown maiden of his first real 
Fourth of July. 


52 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XII. 

SOLDIERS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. 

During the vacation, Fred’s employment landed him in 
the City of Toronto. While there, on a cool, clear, bright 
summer’s day, Canadian soldiers of the British Empire 
gathered in that great city and from there embarked for a 
journey to London to join the all-around world forces 
of the world’s greatest power, that of Great Britain. The 
Mounted Territorials came in from the far Northwest, 
showing frank weather-beaten faces under huge sombreros, 
impressive in their high top boots, but wearing red coats 
same as their brother soldiers. Then came unit upon unit, 
command upon command of other soldiers, all Red Coats, 
proud to shoulder arms for His Majesty, the king, and the 
many nations over which Edward ruled. The Scotch High- 
landers marched down the streets to the Grand Union Sta- 
tion, with bare legs, in plaided skirts, in tassled turbans, 
and odd, rare and strange from all the rest ; the briskness of 
their stride and the odd shrill music of their bagpipes 
making them the chief attraction of the occasion. 

Thousands upon thousands of loyal subjects of the 
British Empire were in Toronto. From all over Canada, 
people poured into Toronto to give the Canadian Soldiers a 
fine, full-fledged, royal send off, as they took trains enroute 
to the Mother Country. Fred had seen the great 4th of 
July celebration at Buffalo, but this varied. 

Every one of the grand continents and the islands 
of the seas are represented in the army of the British 
Empire. There are Irishmen, Welsh, Scotch, British, Ben- 
galese, Burmamen, Aghanstanites, and East Indians of 
Asia, Canadians, Jamacians, Guinaans, Egyptians, Boers, 
Transvalvians, New Zealanders, and Australians, upholding 
the same flag and fighting for the same great Empire. 
Although their country is a limited monarchy, it is such 
that a man can not enter it and breath the free British air 


90LDIERS OF THE RRITISH EMPIRE 


53 „ 


and remain a slave, whether he be black, brown, red, or 
white; every race under its control takes pride in saying 
“I am a British Subject.” 


54 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XIII. 

WHITE FRIENDS FROM DOWN SOUTH. 

Whoever has been so fortunate as to have visited the 
high cliff and valley city of Quebec must have lasting im- 
pressions of its quaintness. It is also the most historic of 
all the new world cities. There in victory and 
defeat two of the bravest and most renowned sons of 
the Old World saw Death on the battle field, amid 
the clash of sabre and the roar of musketry, and, 
if the fame of Quebec had to rest alone on the heroic man- 
ner in which the French leader, Montcalm, and the British 
leader, Wolfe, saw death there its glory in the annals of 
American history remains yet to be surpassed. But there 
are hundreds of other peculiarly rare and significant events 
that are as much a part of the greatness and history of 
Quebec as tendrils are a part of vines to which they cling. 

Quebec is the most ancient and historic of the New 
World cities. It has three towns, Upper Quebec, Lower 
Quebec, and Rolfe Town. From Lower Town to Upper 
Town, the ascent or incline of the streets is abrupt and 
steep. There are the cliffs that rise above the town and 
run along that most beautiful and broadest of American 
rivers, the sheeny, emerald St. Lawrence. The waters of 
this river wash the base of the Cliffs which are crowned 
at a very high point by the grand and spacious Hotel 
Chatteau de Frontenac. This hotel is one of the most 
expensive and finest in the world. There are for the out- 
door gardens of the Chatteau de Frontenac, long walks and 
parapets with a large pavilion and grand stands where the 
edge of the cliffs project. In the afternoons and evenings, 
elegant and gorgeous promenaders throng there. But upon 
1 he highest promontory of the Cliffs sits the Fort of Quebec, 
with its long stretches of plank walks, parapets, and forti- 
fications. 

Fred arrived in the city very early on a midsummer 
morning. As he reached Quebec, the tolling of Cathedral, 


WHITE FRIENDS FROM DOWN SOUTH 


55 . 


basillica, and chapel bells sounded far and near through 
the clear, still air. Soon he beheld hundreds of brown 
garbed friars, hooded and of flowing beards, creeping along 
in barefeet, telling their beads as they chanted and sang 
the holy songs of Jesus and the Cross. 

As he had the entire day at Quebec, Fred spent the 
time in going from one place of artistic beauty and historic 
interest to another. At the close of the day, the train from 
Quebec to Montreal being made up, Fred stood at the end 
of the sleeping car that was in his charge to receive its 
passengers. All at once his heart beat faster and all of 
his blood surged and tinged. He had heard the familiar 
tones and voices of Southern white people from his home. 
Hastening to. the door of the station, he ran to where Wm. 
Clark and all of his family stood. Everything else was for- 
gotten. Fred was once again in the presence of the proved 
and tried' friends of his family. He dated the beginning of 
things good and elevating to himself and family from 
William Clark and his family. He now saw them in a city 
distant and foreign to their native town, but well dressed 
and groomed and showing prosperity and wealth in their 
manners, but without ostentation or boastfulness. 

“Fred, things are going very nicely with me down in 
Georgia, so I am giving my family an educational trip and 
outing.” They told Fred about his people at home and con- 
gratulated him on his perseverance in his struggle for 
education and preparation for future service and useful- 
ness. 


56 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

HEROES ON THE UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL 
AND BASEBALL TEAM. 

With the closing of summer, Fred’s vacations, like that 
of his brother Theodore, came to an end. He hastened 
back to Boston and to his studies. He was a real University 
man now. His strenuous employment and long trips had 
brought him face to face with different nationalities and 
peoples. He had seen the manners and methods of more 
than one class and one section. It did not take him very 
long to decide that beautiful and magnificent as Boston 
was, there were other big and great cities in the North, 
West, and in Canada, that were also beautiful and magnifi- 
cent in many ways. 

The Summer’s work was sufficiently paying to enable 
him to get all the necessary clothing and to have enough 
money for his new school year at the University and to 
obviate the necessity of his putting in hours early and late 
and all of his spare time in doing any other odd jobs to 
make ends meet. With his early and late hours and his 
spare time at his disposal, he decided to go in for other 
things that the University life afforded other than mere 
class-room work and study. He chose at first the debating- 
club and literary societies. 

While Frederick was pushing himself onward and up- 
ward in the College of the University at Boston, Theodore 
was making good in the Scientific School of Cornell Univer- 
sity. In the summer, Theodore had worked )way up high 
in the mountain fastness of New England. Short, encour- 
aging, and hopeful letters were the only way that they 
communicated with each other. When Theodore returned 
to the Scientific School, he informed Frederick with what 
renewed and increased physical strength and vigor he had 
returned to his studies ; that his comrades and schoolmates 
had insisted that he go in for football; that he had joined 
the football squad; that he had been passed from scrub to 


HEROES ON THE UNIV. FOOTBALL & BASEBALL TEAM 57. 


varsity team; that he had been chosen and listed one of 
the team's half-backs ; that the first rival football team had 
been met and the final rush to victory was due to his speed. 
Scant as was the mentioning the Metropolitan dailies gave 
to Theodore's playing nevertheless, it was being watched 
in contradistinction to the strong manner in which they 
lauded the extraordinary showing and strength of his team 
and the way in which the school was headed straight to the 
first place of honor and victory in the football field for the 
year. What little that was said about Theodore's playing 
was enough for all who read to see and understand that 
the lead of the school, its rise and victories, were the abso- 
lute and sole achievements of its famous Negro half-back, 
Theodore Roosevelt Lewis. The Metropolitan papers, as 
well as the Associated Press, finally became ashamed of 
themselves and, like the great institutions of England, 
France, and Russia, took the lid off, and were willing to 
accord honor where it was due and merited without regard 
to race or color. Accordingly, instructions went out to take 
off the frigid blanket from the famous Negro half-back, and 
to let the reading public become acquainted with what this 
brown lad, the foremost hero of the American football 
gridiron was accomplishing. Then the world saw and knew 
the famous Negro half-back and from Robert Lamart's fer- 
tile and rich River Bottoms, where once he toiled, as peon 
and slave, to the classic halls and blood-soiled national re- 
serves of Boston, the entire nation gave glad acclamations 
and cheers of recognition. 

Then it became a question, nation wide, as to what 
would Theodore Roosevelt Lewis do to uphold the enchanced 
glory and strength of his school when off from his grounds 
and points of advantage, as face to face, and player to 
player, the team would stand at New Haven, the territory 
of Yale to contest with the proud and brave sons of unterri- 
fied Old Eli. 

The day came, while all the world listened and won- 
dered! His friends at Tuskegee secured a special wire. 


58 . 


THE EXODUS. 


Avaricious and proud, marble face, Robert Lamart, in the 
disgust and rage, nourished by his dominant superiorly, 
cursed and swore, all the while appeasing his wrath with 
constant libations of whiskey. Frederick at Boston smiled 
and calmly waited for the triumphs of his brother who had 
made Booker T. Washington cry on account of the lad's 
sacrificial devotion to duty. 

Then on the enviable day when it had to be written in 
the glorious annals of American football achievements that 
the alert, ever strong, and vigilant football team of Yale 
University met defeat without a score at the hands of a 
single, solitary, brown-faced player, Theodore Roosevelt 
Lewis; at his hands, because he was the life of the team, 
its speed, its strength and its victory. He skirted the fields 
for long and successful goal runs, squeezed and wiggled 
through their strongest defenses and interference, and, be- 
fore his opponents realized fully his escape, he had again 
and again placed the pigskin across the goal-line. 

The decisive victories of Theodore on the gridiron in- 
spired Frederick and when the Spring came to Boston, it 
found him trying out for a chance with the team of his 
school on the baseball diamond. It did not take long for 
the coach and his comrades to discover in him the best 

pitching ability in all the school. When the baseball sched- 
ule was entered upon Frederick was listed as the first 
pitcher of the University team. Whenever he pitched for 
his school, victory came. At the close of the year, he 
found himself to be the most famous and successful base- 
ball pitcher in all the schools of the GREAT, BIG FREE 
NORTH AND EAST. 


WINNING IN ORATORY AND SCHOLARSHIP 59. 

CHAPTER XV. 

WINNING IN ORATORY AND SCHOLARSHIP. 

There is a glory of College and University life which 
belongs to football and baseball. It is the glory of strength 
and speed coupled with youth, training, and developed 
thinking for the strenuous, out-door arena life that appeals 
to the heroic and vigorous element of advanced students. 
But there are other fields of arduous thinking and hard 
struggles that claim the best attention and thought of the 
superior and most worthy who are students of our Colleges 
and Universities. It is the field of excellence in oratory 
and the field of mastery in scholarship. Triumphs and 
victories in these last two fields are not so much heralded, 
lauded, and proclaimed as they are for those of football; 
but the benefits and utility of the latter victories are far 
more enduring and serviceable than those attained at foot- 
ball or baseball. Fortunately, Frederick and Theodore were 
of a brood and kind that always get the very best that is 
offered. They only ask for the open door, otherwise called 
and styled CHANCE, OPPORTUNITY. 

Frederick heard the announcements and saw the 
posters for prizes in oratory and in scholarship, and soon 
observed that the strongest and most wise among the stu- 
dents held the highest and most honored places. He decided 
to go in for them. It was not long after he had made up his 
mind to try for the prizes, that he found himself far more 
devoted to study and research work than ever before. This 
placed into his daily routine and life a method and principle 
of self-examination, a personally conducted try-out of him- 
self, by himself, to obtain for himself his own accuracy, 
efficiency, and measurements. 

He soon discovered that he was getting more out of 
his school life through the new method than ever before. 
He also found himself advanced in estimation and regard 
among the other students and members of his class, partic- 
ularly with the consecrated to duty and those whose ac- 


60 . 


THE EXODUS. 


tions, determinations, and earnestness destroyed every 
doubt against thorough application and devotion to their 
studies and to broader things and higher purposes of life. 
That which pleased him most was the fact that his addi- 
tional ease and poise as first-rate student and a superior 
among his classmates were not only recognized by in- 
structors and professors but gladly accepted by them in a 
spirit of friendly encouragement and unmistakable appre- 
ciation. It was a helpful, awakening to Frederick, and he 
became convinced that the winning of a prize for scholar- 
ship, and securing the acclamations and plaudits of others 
for high attainments in research work and study, Were vain 
honors in comparison with the more valuable acquisitions 
of the inner consciousness of having fixed within one's mind 
and unshaken confidence that you know you know what 
you ought to know, and that you have so mastered what 
you have gone over that any failure of controlling such for 
beneficial and practical use is impossible. 

Before the last schedule of subjects were finished and 
the averages of the students announced, Frederick had so 
greatly excelled his nearest rival for the highest honors of 
class-scholarship that success was assured him. But he 
loved the mastery of things, constancy, and perseverance, 
and he cheerfully and merrily kept going on in his proved 
method and adopted course of ardous but triumphant study. 
Victorious as best scholar, but one other avenue of meri- 
torious and worth-the-while endeavor was available to him, 
and that was in oratory. 

The former peon and slave of avaricious, proud, rich, 
and vaulting Robert Lamart, with fresh and keen appetite 
entered the list of University students along with other 
ambitious youths of College careers who dared to be upper- 
most in oratory at Boston when the chosen, best, and 
selected few would vie one with the other at the intellectual 
center and literary hub of the nation for championship in 
public speaking. It was very Bostonian; here, at the place 
of the historic tea-party, enacted in heroic and sacrificial 


WINNING IN ORATORY AND SCHOLARSHIP 


61 . 


earnestness, no better proclamation for democracy nor pro- 
test against tyranny could have been desired when the 
brown-faced son of a Negro illiterate placed himself in the 
cultured ranks of those who are the proud sons of the 
mighty captains of the nation's industries; sons of famous 
state and national legislators and eminent jurists; diplo- 
mats, historians, great educators, and theologians. The 
martyred spirit of the immortal, black Crispus Attucks, 
the first of all American patriots to shed his blood for the 
nation's independence, in militant influence strengthened 
the mind and mold of this latter day Negro who, in his 
glowing youth and laudable undertaking, was attesting the 
efficiency and undying worth of what Crispus Attucks gave 
himself to death and martyrdom for, on the blood-stained 
fields of Boston Commons; it was freedom and democracy 
not canted about nor sounded in euphonetic phrases and 
illustrated in lengthy state papers, but actually emphasized 
in undisputable acts. In Great and Free Boston, where the 
first shot for the birth of our Republic was sounded, where 
Liberty's holy flames were set abuming, where the blood 
of the first American martyr and patriot, that of a Negro, 
consecrated by his death in arms the first new-world soil 
to INDEPENDENCE and OPPORTUNITY, the doors of 
all the great schools and universities swing wide open, 
affording and actually giving their vast advantages to any 
and all, without regard to color, race, creed, or PREVIOUS 
CONDITION OF SERVITUDE. Avarice and Prejudice, 
Oligarchy and Tyranny, looked up to Boston from the 
South, and, in the cruel relentless, predominant superiority 
of white, marble-faced, Robert Lamart, sent from Dixie- 
land’s canebrakes and cotton fields its hell-dirty and cold- 
blooded challenge to Great and Free Boston. Plain and 
simple, terse and true, the answer rang back throughout 
the cotton-fields and river-bottoms of the South, from halls 
of learning and place of fame, deserved, merited, and won, 
as Frederick Douglass Lewis surpassed all of his opponents 
in the oratorical contest at the University of Boston, speak- 


62 . 


THE EXODUS. 


ing on a subject of his own choosing “THE AMERICAN 
NEGRO'S RIGHT TO ALL THE ADVANTAGES AND 
OPPORTUNITIES THAT OUR DEMOCRATIC GOVERN- 
MENT AFFORDS.” 


THE MASTER SCIENTIST OF HIS CLASS 


63 . 


CHAPTER XVI; 

THE MASTER SCIENTIST OF HIS CLASS. 

Theodore, unlike Frederick, did not aspire to excell in 
public speaking, but the two brothers were very much alike 
in the way they mastered their subjects. As an eagle takes 
to soaring to the cliffs and peaks of the highest mountains' 
tops, both Fred, and Theo. in the same devoted, thorough 
masterful way, took to a thorough apprehension and un- 
derstanding of their subjects. The younger brother in the 
Big, Mighty North was able to exchange letters with the 
older brother in Big Free Boston, one relating to other the 
safe and sound steps each was taking as they mounted the 
ladders of preparation that led to the doors of the actual 
battles of life and their struggle for usefulness, in which 
the weak perish and the fit survive. 

Theodore's mind led him to cling to the mechanical 
and scientific side of education and training. He was de- 
termined to find the minutest elements in the bulky aggre- 
gations and great masses that he saw in the vast world of 
matter. He was intensely concerned in every step that led 
to the completed engine, the finished machine, and all 
around, ready house. He was often in the labratory where 
he subjected various fluids to tests and dissolved metals to 
their simpler compounds. He would go to the museums and 
make himself a master of the biological specimens there, 
distinguishing differences and grouping classes. He gave 
himself to his scientific researches and studies as he had 
given himself to his football games, determined to succeed, 
to win, and that he gloriously did. 

The football favorite and hero of the school, one of 
the very few there who were not of the majority and 
white Race, Theodore, with his marvelous, brown, skin face 
and still more dark-brown eyes, was greatly distinguished 
among his fellow students and also admired and esteemed 
by all. So it did not take long for his superior traits, his 


64 . 


THE EXODUS. 


unusal devotion and application to study, to single him out 
individually among the students. He struck his pace for 
the first place as student in the school and, one by one, other 
ambitious and arduous youths bent also on winning, saw 
in him the one whom they could never beat, gave place to 
his overmastering strides, and let him push to the place 
that the most thorough and best only could attain and 
hold. Theodore won, and it was indeed a something in the 
swift ’flight of a decade to have emerged from the despicable 
peonage on the rich River Bottom Farm of Robert Lamart 
to the devoted self-sacrificing student at Tuskegee whose 
instant nobility cut tears from the heart of Booker T. 
Washington, to THE MASTER SCIENTIST OF HIS CLASS 
in a great University of the Big, Mighty North. 


MAKING GOOD IN THE;WORLD’S BROADFIELD OF BATTLE 65 

CHAPTER XVn. 

MAKING GOOD IN THE WORLD’S BROAD 
FIELD OF BATTLE. 

Free Boston, Generous Boston, Noble-minded Boston, 
Thoughtful Boston was very proud of the brown-faced 
student who, in many a close pinch, by his skillful pitching, 
had brought the University baseball team out ahead and 
kept it ahead. It became a happy witness to his other 
achievements in the higher spheres of University life, and 
finally under the most hopeful and wholesome circum- 
stances, beheld his graduation. Soon Frederick was ad- 
mitted to the Bar and at once entered upon an active and 
successful career as attorney. He gained the respect and 
co-operation of the members of the Boston Bar and the 
confidence of the judges who presided on the Bench as 
jurists in that great city. His fame and name spread afar, 
and the example of his merited and worthy rise from 
peonage and ignorance, to freedom and intelligence was 
everywhere pointed to as a justification of the American 
Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson 
and the Emancipation Proclamation written by Abraham 
Lincoln. 

It was not only at Boston, Massachusetts, that Fred- 
erick was appreciated. The best Americans and the good 
citizens in all sections of the country hailed his advent and 
success in American life as one of the finest signs and 
prophesies of American Democracy. The fact that the son 
of a former slave was so able and worthy, and that his 
capability and merit had won recognition, were pointed to 
as the most choice and rare chapters in the history of the 
American Republic. The National Government was not 
slow to awake to the broad opportunity that Frederick 
offered it, to show commendation and recognition of the 
marvelous development and rapid strides ahead of the 
Race that Frederick represented. The Federal Government 
at Washington beheld a racial element of the American 


66 . 


THE EXODUS. 


Democracy that a few years back had been held in ava- 
ricious bondage and tyrannical slavery contrary to every 
precept and principle of a free and Christian people, by 
sheer ability and struggle preparing young men and women 
capable of creditably filling any station of honor, pay, and 
trust within the gift of the Government. And honorable 
and righteous Federal policy of the Open Door of Hope was 
announced for the Government from the White House for 
the Negro Race in the United States of America, and ac- 
cordingly, our hero was appointed Assistant United States 
District Attorney, at Boston, Massachusetts. 

As the Honorable Frederick Douglass Lewis sat in the 
spacious office that he occupied as Assistant United States 
District Attorney, and as he appeared in the performance 
of his duties of office before judge and jury in the United 
States District Court at Boston, the hub of the entire 
nation and New England's mighty metropolis, his memory 
fled back to the days of his boyhood life when he and the 
loved ones of his family were forced by curses, threats, and 
deadly weapons to remain inhabitants of the wretched hovel 
of Robert Lamart and slaves on his rich River Bottoms. 

When Theodore graduated from the Scientific School 
of the University that he attended, he was immediately 
accorded employment in one of the largest industrial plants 
of New York State. The President and Faculty of his 
school recommended him, and, under such favorable 
chances, all Theodore asked for and wished was the 
OPPORTUNITY to make good. That was gladly given to 
him, and from engineer, master mechanic, turbine, engineer, 
to consulting engineer, he went to the enviable position of 
departmental engineer with a whole division of a great 
plant absolutely under his control. 


A CALL TO THE SOUTH 


67 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

A CALL TO THE SOUTH. 

Pollard Lewis had not been idle during the last few 
years during which his two sons, Frederick and Theodore, 
had risen to prominence and usefulness. He did his part 
well under his changed and prosperous conditions. He had 
so much more to hope for, so much more to be thankful 
for. The Clarks remained his constant and firm friends. 
He repaid them, as did every other member of his family, 
with gratitude and loyalty of an unpurchasable and price- 
less kind. From their far away stations in the East and 
North, Frederick and Theodore tenderly and sacredly re- 
membered the Clarks, their white benefactors and friends 
at their Georgia- home. Pollard Lewis exerted himself in 
the best way he knew how to educate and improve the con- 
ditions of his children who remained with him. But, soon 
after the older boys left one of the teachers died, and the 
ether was called away. The school authorities, in this 
Dixie community, plainly showed how glad they were that 
the painstaking teachers who had struggled so faithfully 
and strenuously to improve the community, were gone for- 
ever, and let it be known that they were not anxious to have 
such devoted and good Negro teachers as the ones now 
gone, again in their community. 

Pollard Lewis took this discouraging problem to heart 
and finally had one of the girls to write to Frederick, ex- 
plaining the situation. Frederick saw an opportunity to 
allow his beloved Thelma, the dainty, brown maiden of his 
4th of July romance at Buffalo, to fulfill her desire of 
serving by teaching her people in the South. So he in- 
formed his family that he would try to get a proper teacher 
for them and on the same day he sent a letter to the young 
woman whom he loved with an offer in the letter of se- 
curing the school at his home for her if she still longed to 
do such work in the South. 

Thelma Marshall was comeliness and grace, beauty and 


68 . 


THE EXODUS. 


prettiness combined in one person. Everything about her, 
as you saw her, even before you knew her, spoke to your 
soul and indicated innate culture born within her and as 
much a part of her as the air that she breathed, and the 
inspiring and pure sentiments which she expressed. She 
could never be justly described. One must know her, must 
see her, must feel her angelic like influences, must drink 
from the deep depths of her sustaining and noble disposi- 
tion, to realize what a gem of feminine perfection was 
fashioned by a Divine Hand when she was born. Such 
superfine girls as Thelma Marshall are designed only to 
be the sweethearts of heroes and the wives of noblemen. 
She was dainty, she was neither tall nor large, nor was she 
strikingly small. She was an exquisite creature and the 
first time you beheld her you would believe .that everything 
about her was just as it ought to be. Her eyes were deep 
and brown, expressive and roundly oval, adorned by 
feathery brows and protected by lashes that a queen would 
want or goddess envy. Her hair was black, and long and 
luzuriant, her forehead prominent, and her lips modest and 
cherry-red. To these coronets of natural endowments there 
was added such an oval face that presented the world's most 
admirable color and complexion, a clear, smooth, transparent 
brown. Shapeful of neck and shoulders, with matchless 
round arms and dainty hands, the physique and entire 
form of Thelma Marshall would make her any hero's heroine 
provided her surpassing form enfolded a character virtuous, 
good, and noble. When she spoke you could make profane- 
less oath that centuries of melody and ages of music had 
been compressed all of those lengthy periods in her throat 
just for you, and that you were the most favored of all 
mortals in being allowed to drink in the pleasing tones of 
her heavenly voice. Her manners denoted unmistakable 
refinement and the ease and poise with which she met you 
emphasized her gentle breeding and wise education. Above 
all else, she was an ideal patriot and a Christian. 

When Frederick's letter arrived, offering her the place 


A CALL TO THE SOUTH 


69 . 


of teacher at his home in Georgia, those lovely eyes of hers 
sparkled with gladness, and her heart beat with joy; the 
unexpressible joy that she felt, and her soul responded to 
the call of duty and service fully and instantly. She sought 
her parents' permission, but they and the other members of 
her family absolutely and stoutly refused. They did not 
wish even to hear her expressing a wish to go to what they 
termed, “The barbarious, cruel and backward South in 
Dixie’s lynch and slaveland,” on any mission and for any- 
thing. With derision, they spoke of her desires to go and 
even went so far as to doubt and question her sanity. But 
Frederick’s letter came to her with its appeal as if it was 
the voice of God and the call from Macedonia. She pros- 
trated herself before her people and with tears staining 
her lovely face, besought them in the name of Jesus to 
sanction her going where her heart called her to and where 
she felt the Almighty bade her to go. She was the darling 
and idol of that free Northern family, and they hated to 
see their most precious human possession crying, lament- 
ing, and prone before them, seeking that which in itself 
was not to be despised or counted ignoble. With great 
reluctance, they gave way to her irresistable appeals. 


70 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

PARIS AND ALL FRANCE GLORIOUSLY WELCOME 

GRAND CORPS OF FRENCH AFRICAN SOLDIERS 

There are many great and metropolitan cities in this 
old world of ours, both in the Orient and the Occident, but 
Paris, in its superfine and superior ways, eclipses them all. 
London has the River Thames, the Tower, and the London 
Bridge. New York has the Brooklyn Bridge, towering 
skyscrapers, and out in the waters where lay the navigable 
approach to that city stands a dumb, silent, speechless 
statue over it, THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. But within 
Paris, in the emotions and hearts of its people beat and 
live the principles of Liberty! It is indeed the one, and the 
only great metropolitan city of the universe in which 
enunciations of EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND LIBER- 
TY mean more than sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. 
There are indeed monuments and statues galore in Paris ; 
grateful expressions of the , profound appreciation and the 
perpetual memories which abide with the living for the 
heroic and noble French dead ; but out of the waters of the 
Seine, towering high over its banks; no elemental dimen- 
sions and forms of Liberty towers high over its banks, no 
elemental dimensions and forms of Liberty tower o’er the 
thirty bridges; over the many avenues, hills, parks, and 
streets of the world’s most beautiful and most vivacious 
people. Parisians have little if any need for a silent, 
speechless, and meaningless Statue of Liberty to stand forth 
over them, with arms extended to Paradise and Jehovah, for 
their enlightment.’ Parisians are the human, mortal 
gods and goddesses of Liberty. Well is it indeed that the 
Statue of Liberty stands forth above New York City, its 
harbors and waters, enlighting Americans. It was neither 
folly nor foolishness that placed that statue there. No mis- 
take was made if the motive was to better and uplift Amer- 
icans. When EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, and LIBERTY 
prevail, we Americans will do, at least sybolically, as French- 


THE EXODUS. 


71 


men once did with their hypocritical and vain monuments — 
tear them down. 

All causes for war between France and Germany over 
the Algerian and Morrocco questions apparently having been 
amicably adjusted, it was many seasons after this adjust- 
ment that there marched through the beautiful avenues and 
magnificent boulevards of Paris the Grand Army Corps 
of her African troops. Spectacular as was this display of the 
brown and black troops of the French Republic, there was 
an ideal realism about it that no people on earth knew better 
how to appreciate than the French; no city on earth could 
appreciate this spectacle better than the French city of Paris. 
French statesmen had demonstrated their ability and French 
diplomats their learning and wisdom by successfully consumat- 
ing the all important North-Afriean question that postponed 
for a more fortutious time the struggle of blood and faith that 
the French were soon destined to make in behalf of world- 
democracy and the recovery of their lost Alsace and Lorraine. 

Now on the occasion of the coming to her of these brown 
and black troops. Paris did not fail to bring up and to live up 
to her part in the nations of the world, that is of being a real 
Democracy and a Republican people. Not a republic by 
statues and constitution, nor a democracy by lengthy state 
papers and tiresomely extending declarations and docu- 
ments, but the Paris that Paris was, one of EQUALITY. 
FRATERNITY, and LIBERTY, which were the natural 
elements, living fires, and irrespressible emotions that con- 
stituted the beings and souls of Parisians and Frenchmen. 
Paris, always gay, went ju biant over the brown and black 
soldiers of the FRENCH EMPIRE who paraded the match- 
less streets and lounged in the magnificent parks of the 
brilliant and dazzling city. Bouquets and flowers and other 
pleasing and sweet things were honorably and royally be- 
stowed and lavished upon those fighting brown and black 
men whose courage and valor could be depended upon when 
that great people would retrieve its calamitous Sedan on 


72 . 


THE EXODUS. 


the fields of the Mame, and around the fortified Verdum. 

Now at this time, the inventive genius of the world had 
very closely related and tied France with the South's Dixie- 
land, in fact, had put them in speaking distance by wireless 
and through the cables; and what transpired to the unmis- 
takable delight and pleasure of Frenchmen when her brown 
and black soldiers were quartered In her most ancient and 
chief city, disgusted certain Americans in Dixieland of the 
dominant and superior cult and class of Robert Lamart. 
Moreover, the element who were journalists, immediately 
took the characteristic Southern poise when real EQUAL- 
ITY, FRATERNITY, and LIBERTY are manifested by men 
of white breed anywhere, to those who appear to be in any 
way related to the brown or black Race of Almighty God's 
people. So the maidens and matrons of Paris were bitterly 
attacked and it would have indeed afforded very odd and 
strange reading to Parisians if they could have read the 
bitter attacks of a Dixieland paper that derided the occasion 
with biting sarcasm and fiery ridicule. 


ENGLAND’S COLORED SOLDIERS 


73 


CHAPTER XX. 

ENGLAND’S COLORED SOLDIERS. 

It is not only the person from the British Isles, but it 
is also the proudest claim of any person from any part of 
the British Empire, “I am a British subject!” Those words 
are potential. From one reign to another, multiplied again 
and again, those words have been a fortification to every 
British subject wherever the proud flag of the mighty Em- 
pire waved. And their potentiality is not to be discounted 
in foreign lands save in the case of an Ethiopian in the 
United States, particularly in Dixieland being taken for an 
American Negro. Constitutional safeguards, calm, cool, de- 
liberate, and equal justice in the Courts; the fullest assur- 
ance to and protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness are the actual, real and unmistakable heritage of 
every British-born subject where the British throne con- 
trols and dominates. Even in British dominions, such as 
Australia, New' Zealand, Canada, and the South African 
Colonies where the American sins of race discriminations, 
oppressions, and proscription have been more or less intro- 
duced, the higher and nobler British ideals of freedom and 
justice will soon triumph. But one of the finest examples 
of British greatness is seen and exhibited in her fine sol- 
diery. A British soldier is hale, hearty, jovial, and without 
any fear. He is the embodiment of the free spirit of a fair 
people. It is the fair and free spirit of the British Empire 
that claim the allegiance of her splendid colored army Fine 
brown men of Asia, and dark men from the islands of the 
seas, are too glad to face death under the English standards, 
fighting with their white comrades of the world’s biggest 
and grandest empire. England has no paltry few of these 
her darker soldiers. There are grand armies of them as 
well as smaller units, and the devilish and hellish color 
caste and prejudice bar no individual brown or black from 
serving side by side in the same command with white men 
as brothers, and companions. One of the proudest scenes 


74 . 


THE EXODUS. 


of the present World-War was one in which a young and 
noble appearing Negro of Jamacia, enlisted in a command 
with white Englishmen, winning in fair and honorable com- 
petition a military trophy in one of the athletic meetings 
and receiving the prize from the hands of her Majesty, 
Queen Anne, the wife of King George, the ruler of the 
British Empire. 


UNCLE SAM’S COLORED SOLDIERS 


75 


CHAPTER XXL 

UNCLE SAM’S COLORED SOLDIERS. 

The most heroic and historic part enacted by black men 
under arms for Freedom and Liberty has been in the New 
World, on the northern part of our American Continent, 
and south of us in the West Indies Islands. The most 
eulogistic address and finest tribute ever rendered to mar- 
tial hero or statesman by another man is Wendell Phillip’s 
address on Toussaint L’Overture whom he solemnly declared 
excelled Napoleon of the French, Cromwell of the English, 
and George Washington of our American people. Hidden 
and suppressed as is largely the case with the commendable 
and exemplary achievements and deeds of black men in 
arms, but in spite of this niggardly hiding and suppressing, 
the necessity that made indispensible their plucky fighting 
as patriotic soldiers; the dash and spirit with which they 
answered and met Freedom and Liberty’s call to arms, and 
the quality of their services and the righteousness and 
sacredness of the causes for which black men have bravely 
and unshrinkingly given their life’s blood, undoubtedly 
throw halos of glory around the American Negro’s mili- 
tary career, and must, in the minds of all who are both 
well informed and without bias, give to the American black 
men the chief and first place for fame and honor on the 
battle fields of the New World. Some day, when the Gov- 
ernment is in the hands of those who w T ill smite the iniquit- 
ous “Jim Crowism,” black men will be given a chance to 
volunteer in every branch of arms, infantry, cavalry, ar- 
tillery, signal service, aviation, ordnance, in every state of 
the Union, and, as a class and race, they will not be “Jim 
Crowed” by departmental order to enlist only as 
STEVEDORES. Each state will be proud to have its Negro 
National Guard. 

Take for example, the spontaneous bands of black 
liberators of Haiti whom Toussiant L’Overture led and 
marshaled against his trained white opponents, and you will 


76 . 


THE EXODUS. 


find it an impossible task in all the other instances of mar- 
tial men struggling for Freedom or Independence to show 
others who in the face of apparent insurmountable odds, 
fought and won as did those Haitians of America. Against 
Toussiant L’Overture’s incoherent, untutored, but inspired 
clans of black Haitian liberators were marshaled and 
trained at one and the other time, the conscripted and 
selected best soldiers that mighty, proud, and conquering 
France could afford, or undaunted and victorious Old Eng- 
land could get together! But to what did these amount to 
against the long pent-up forces of black Ethiopians when 
given a chance as men and soldiers; a real opportunity on 
the holy ground of equal and open battle? Emphatic and 
unmistakable the Haitians answered as they put to flight 
and route both the French and the English, who were in 
turn driven from their fair Island. 

But more recent is the fame and name of Cuba’s fight- 
ing, black hero, Antonio Maceo. He it was who, with un- 
excelled dash, fire, and pluck, led the patriots of that beau- 
tiful Island against the haughty Spanish soldiers whom 
iron-hearted Weyler led. The story of the fiery genius, 
heroic dash and martial grandeur of General Antonio 
Maceo, Cuban patriot of Negro blood more than all else be- 
came the story of Freedom and Humanity, and spoke to the 
hearts and souls of the liberty-loving throughout the world 
with pursuasive and inspiring power. Great and noble were 
these two black Generals and Liberators in life, and their 
deaths were sublimely sad and tragic. 

The black soldiers who have interwoven their feats in 
the battles and victories of the United States are Uncle 
Sam’s Colored Soldiers. Ineffaceable and plainly there 
stand to the credit of this black soldiery the giving of the 
first blood and the loosing of the first life that went to pur- 
chase the Freedom and Independence of our United States 
from the autocratic, tyrannical rule of King George the III. 
It was indeed a black volunteer who was the very first of 
all Americans to fall in battle-line as he sprang forth w r ith 


UNCLE SAM’S COLORED SOLDIERS 


77 . 


and in the vanguard of those Americans who first of all 
gave shot and steel to the British Red Coats on Boston Com- 
mons, in the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770. This man 
was Crispus Auttcks, and he fell: 

“With his back to the field and his feet to the foe, 

And leaving in battle no blot on his name. 

Look proudly to Heaven from the death-bed of fame!” 

Whenever given a chance in our first, great Revolu- 
tionary War, no one made better use of the Patriot's oppor- 
tunity to sacrifice and suffer, to fight, bleed, and die for 
the independence of the country, its freedom, and liberty 
than Uncle Sam's Colored Soldiers. When the British, once 
defeated, came back again, in the War of 1812, General 
Andrew Jackson, recognizing the patriotism and valor of 
the Negroes, appealed particularly to them, and they re- 
sponded so bravely that General Jackson took special care 
and pains in complimenting them ; and to the honors gained 
when Crispus Attucks fell in martyrdom for Freedom and 
Independence on Boston Commons, Uncle Sam’s Colored 
Soldiers have added other innumerable honors, always go- 
ing forward and never betraying the nation's flag and its 
honors, nor retreating from its firing line. We have spoken 
of America’s greatest and sweetest poet, the most ideal- 
lyric creator of Creation, the black warbler and genius, 
Paul, Laurence Dunbar. Let us listen at him singing a 
song of Uncle Sam's Colored Soldiers: 

THE COLORED SOLDIERS 

If the muse were mine to tempt it 
And my feeble voice were strong, 

If my tongue were trained to measures, 

I would sing a stirring song 
I would sing a song heroic 

Of those noble sons of Ham, 

Of those gallant colored soldiers 
Who fought for Uncle Sam! 


THE EXODUS. 


In the early days you scorned them, 

And with many a flip and flout 
Said “These battles are the white man’s” 
And the whites will fight them out.” 
Up the hills you fought and faltered, 

In the vales you strove and bled, 
While your ears still heard the thunder 
Of the foes’ advancing tread. 


Then distress fell on the nation, 

And the flag was drooping low; 

Should the dust pollute your banner? 

No! the nation shouted, No! 

So when War, in savage triumph, 

Spread abroad his funeral pall — 

Then you called the colored soldiers, 

And they answered to your call. 

And like hounds unleased and eager 
For the life blood of the prey, 

Sprung they forth and bore them bravely 
In the thickest of the fray. 

And where’er the fight was hottest, 

Where the bullets fastest fell, 

There they pressed unblanched and fearless 
At the very mouth of hell. 

Ah, they rallied to the standard 
To uphold it by their might: 

None were stronger in the labors, 

None were braver in the fight. 

From the blazing breach of Wagner 
To the plains of Olustee, 

They were foremost in the fight 
Of the battles of the free. 


And at Pillow! God have mercy 
On the deeds committeed there. 
And the souls of those poor victims 
Sent to thee without a prayer 
Let the fulness of thy pity 

O’er the hot wrought spirits sway 
Of the gallant colored soldiers 

Who fell fighting on that day! 


Yes, the Blacks enjoy their freedom, 
And they won it dearly, too, 

For the life blood of their thousands 
Did the southern fields bestrew, 

In the darkness of their bondage, 

In the depths of slavery’s night, 
Their muskets flashed the dawning, 

And they fought their way to light. 


THE COLORED SOLDIERS 


79 


They were comrades then and brothers, 
Are they more or less to-day? 

They were good to stop a bullet 
And to front the fearful fray. 

They were citizens and soldiers, 

When rebellion raised its head; 

And the traits that made them worthy, — 
Ah! those virtues are not dead. 

They have shared your mighty vigils, 

They have shared your daily toil; 

And their blood with yours co-mingling, 
Has enriched the Southern soil. 

They have slept and marched and suffered 
’Neath the same dark skies as you, 

They have met as fine a foemen, 

And have been as tried and true. 

And their deeds shall find a record 
In the registry of Fame; 

For their blood has cleansed completely, 
Every blot of Slavery’s shame; 

So all honor and all glory 

To those noble sons of Ham — 

The gallant colored soldiers, 

Who fought for Uncle Sam! 


80 . 


THE EXODUS. ~|f 


CHAPTER XXII. 

EUROPE AT WAR. 

When we Americans dreamed, planned, and thought to 
stage the most magnificent endeavor and spectacle of 
world-wide interest and universal concern, and had wrought 
out a wise scheme, not only to stage this affair in one of 
our most commodious and noted metropolitan and seaport 
cities, that of San Francisco, a gunshot was deliberately 
fired that has set to action the most ponderous and world- 
wide booming of cannons known to the memory of man 
or that shall ever be recorded in history. This shot was 
fired at a time when America only dreamed and thought 
of Peace and the industrial and inventive rewards of Peace, 
and through Peace our nation expected such conquests as 
only come through international amity and friendly com- 
mercial intercourse. American genius, its brawny strength 
and power of wealth, had about removed the elemental and 
natural barriers that separated the mighty Atlantic on the 
East from the Pacific on the West and were thereby short- 
ening the commercial and navigable distance from one great 
ocean to the other, the Atlantic on the East and the Pacific 
on the West, by many thousand miles. The opening of the 
Panama Canal was properly and reasonably looked forward 
to as the most auspicious and promising mile-stone in the 
progressive march of Art, Industry, and Science that the 
world had ever had. New Orleans of the South, the Queen 
City on the Gulf, and San Francisco of the West, the Golden 
Gate City of the Pacific Coast, nobly strove against each 
other to obtain the coveted and worthy prize of holding the 
momentous celebration of the completion of the Panama 
Canal ; for at this celebration our nation was to be the host 
of the other nations of the earth. In the spirited contest, 
San Francisco won, but before her golden gates could be 
thrown open to serve the nation as host to the other nations, 
of the world, most of the European Nations were at war, 
and all of this was due to the firing of a shot, but it was 
fired at royalty. 


EUROPE AT WAR 


81 . 


The opening of the Panama Canal brought on a pon- 
derous question, particularly discussed in the South. It 
was predicted that vast hordes of raw and skilled Europeans 
would come into the South through the seaports of that 
section. Not a few whites stoutly advanced desires and 
purposes to get rid of the American Negro, to the manor 
born, and in the Negro’s stead to place white Europeans. 
Colored people, limited almost altogether to the open forums 
of their churches, pondered this question in their churches 
and seriously wondered if things portended to their undoing 
in the Southland, and if the opening of the Panama Canal 
was a prophetic handwriting on the wall, which, when in- 
terpreted, simply meant their going out of the South, and 
the coming in of the peasantry of the Old World. But a 
shot was fired in Europe and the massive hinges of affairs 
turned to unexpected angles. 

Several months after the European war began and as 
many reservists as could make it had hastened to their 
mother lands; the gates of emigration were almost closed. 
Unexpected demands violently struck the South, seeking 
its Negro labor. Negroes, although favoring the milder 
climate of the South, had always, in the line of common 
sense, natural instincts, the undebateable logic of sound 
reasoning, longed for the real democratic institutions and 
republican forms of government that actually obtained 
North, East, and West and which were unknown qualities 
in the South. But fearful of getting employment, they had 
clung to crumbs and a small fraction of a bone lest they 
loose that. They knew that if once they were out of the 
South, their children would freely benefit in sharing the 
improved methods of education that a real and pure demo- 
cratic system of government afforded; that scanty and 
crimpled education, in scarcely run inadequate, dilapidated, 
weather-worn, unsanitary structures were to be found no 
where but for them and for them only in the Southern sec- 
tion; that Democracy, was a something in the South that 
could be applied to benefit, if it benefited anybody at all, 


82 . 


THE EXODUS. 


white people and meant color oligarchy ; that the wages they 
received were small portions and the lesser parts of what 
they actually earned; that legal subterfuges had been en- 
acted nowhere but in the South to dodge and evade the 
Federal constitution; that when they rode on the common 
carriers of passengers equality of accommodations was 
never afforded and that the heinous “Jim Crowism” of the 
South meant to the entire Negro population of Dixieland 
just what a gun in the hands of Jesse James had meant to 
the party whom that noted bandit held upon the highway 
for the purpose of robbery ; that their citizenship and rights 
were not respected by those in authority because they could 
not use the ballot by which authorities are made and un- 
made. These and other as weighty considerations were 
things held in the minds of the greater majority of Southern 
Negroes, but against these things there were interposed 
the statement that, with all of his rights as human being 
and citizen vouchsafed to him everywhere else but in the 
South, he could not get work and that when a man is hungry 
and starved the most precious civil rights are worthless to 
him. Southern Negroes readily sacrificed head and soul to 
the mere assurance of a full stomach. But when the 
world's most fatal shot was fired and Europe became con- 
vulsed in war, the favorable sections called to the Negro 
with offers of double and treble pay; and the Negroes 
awakened from their inhuman and unnatural surroundings, 
sprang forth to the calls of the North and East, longing for 
economic salvation and political emancipation. On the top 
of this, there was no little desire to hold the Negro to the 
South and its inhuman treatment of the Race by nulifying 
the constitutional rights of emigration and migration. Thus 
the subtle cry was raised that Negroes are understood no- 
where but in the South and must die from the severe 
weather; and that the people elsewhere did not wish his 
presence. But the rush away grew instead of diminishing. 
Then the Railroads restricted the number of colored pas- 
sengers to minimum of accommodation so that after a cer- 


EUROPE AT WAR 


83 . 


tain number of tickets were sold to Negro passengers, the 
space alloted for travel of that race would be all gone, and 
at the same time standing ready to put on extra cars and 
as many extra trains to take as many whites wherever they 
wish to travel. In some farm sections, whatever violence 
was necessary to hold the Negroes to the farms, was re- 
sorted to even to the shedding of blood. Negro editors and 
preachers who preferred their own itching palms filled, or 
to have nice church donations, or the gift of clothes, food, 
or a horse and buggy or an automobile, went so far as to 
barter their souls to impede their Race from leaving the 
South as their sense of safety would allow. Add another 
chapter to the Southerner's crime of Reconstruction era 
when he crucified his own conscience and soul by a whole- 
sale purchase of traitorious Negroes as exigencies of their 
dirty politics demanded, the Negro Judases that THE 
EXODUS afforded, and we hit the infamous rottenness of 
certain Dixieland characters and characteristics. But in 
spite of these things, THE EXODUS CONTINUES. 


84 . 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 

MEXICO AND CARRIZAL. 

In contradistinction to the mighty, massive war going 
on in the Old World, America had its irritating smack of 
war in Mexico. The Mexicans began a Civil War a few 
years before the Great World War began and. which now 
promises to linger on when the Great World- War has been 
concluded. It concerns the United States because Mexico 
;s our next door neighbor and also because before this Civil 
War a number of our citizens had very largely contributed 
to the developement of Mexico with brain, money, scientific 
skill, and labor. Besides that Mexican internecine struggle 
disturbed more and more our integrity and tranquility. 

From episode to epoch, from event to tragedy, the 
Mexican war finally led up to a direful catastrophe that vio- 
lated American honor and shed American blood. A com- 
mand of United States soldiers of the Regular Army not 
far from the border line between the United States and 
Mexico were in camp, guarding our citizens, their property, 
and the honor of the nation at Columbus, New Mexico. 
When darkness settled over Columbus, armed mounted 
Mexicans, with United States regulars hot in pursuit of 
them swept down upon the city. Before they had suc- 
ceeded in being routed, they dashed on our soldiers, shot 
into their tents, rode through the town firing promiscously 
and then dashed back across the border line into Mexico. 
A number of our soldiers were wounded and a few died. It 
was not long after this that the President and his Cabinet, 
with the tentative agreement and consent of the Mexican 
Chief-Executive and his Council, had dispatched a compe- 
tent and sufficient force of Regulars into Mexico to intercept 
capture, or break up the band of Mexican bandits respon- 
sible for and directly concerned jn the bold and defiant out- 
rage at Columbus, New Mexico. The National Guard were 
soon assembled, mustered into the Federal service, and 


MEXICO AND CARRIZAL 


85 - 


marshalled along the borders between Mexico and the 
United States. Both with the Regular Army and the 
National Guard, engaged in this martial enterprise for the 
nation were Negro troops who were ready to do their ut- 
most to carry out the bequests and orders of President 
Woodrow Wilson and to uphold the glory and honor of the 
United States. 

There are events in the life of a nation or individual the 
quality of which determines and marks the acme of sacri- 
fices and the crowning points of the life of the nation or 
individual. History has its Sun notch and Time its Zenith. 
The Red Sea must ever be the symbolical dividing line be- 
tween Hebrew and Egyptian. The same field of battle were 
points of destiny for Goliath and David, for Napoleon and 
Wellington; Gettysburgh, was in a way, the crucial testing- 
place for the contending forces on either side of our great 
Civil War. For the brief space during which our soldiers 
saw duty along the border-line and in the interior of Mexico, 
let us mark Carrizal as the place of supreme interest and 
sublime concern. Aside from the invasion at Columbus, 
New Mexico, Carrizal must and will be remembered when 
all else of that stirring, trying campaign may be forgotten. 

It is not that Uncle Sam's colored soldiers had special 
need of a chance or an opportunity to make an honorable 
place for the Race in American history. It is well known 
that such a place had been well madeat the very beginning 
of American history. Carrizal, does say, however, what 
the American Negro chiefly needs and ought to have is a 
fair chance and square opportunity, not to die bravely fight- 
ing for his country with the utmost valor, but as free a 
chance and as fine an opportunity in all the arms, branches, 
and offices and ranks of service, to enjoy equally and freely 
each, every and all benefits, emoluments, offices, and profits 
that the same government affords to white men, for which 
the Negro did his heroic part at Carrizal. 

The heroism of the United States Army was never 
mo^ abler maintained than by its black troopers at Carri- 


86 . 


THE EXODUS. 


zal. When Captain Boyd and his fellow officers of the Black 
Fighting Tenth Cavalry were shown the trail that led back- 
ward and to dishonor and retreat by haughty Mexicans, 
there was no hesitancy in chosing to move forward to vic- 
tory or to be the renowned victims of ambush or massacre 
at the hands of an overwhelming and relentless foe. At 
various distances and from countless points, the eyes and 
minds of the American people were centered upon our sol- 
diers in Mexico, and when the story of the massacre at Car- 
rizal was flashed over America, unstinted praise was gen- 
eral and proclaimed everywhere for the Nation's Negro Sol- 
diers. As it is told, they went about their duty of fighting 
there at Carrizal, against what they soon knew to be tre- 
mendous odds, with cheerful spirits and calm deliberate pur- 
poses of conquering the haughty foe. They were comrades 
to each other, noble upholders of the nation's flag, its honor, 
and untarnished traditions. 


RIOT EXPLOSIONS AND BURNINGS IN TH E NORTH 87 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

RIOT, EXPLOSIONS AND BURNINGS IN THE NORTH. 

The war in Europe brought new and strange things to 
pass in the United States. New plants sprang up in many 
places for the manufacture of war-goods and supplies for 
the Entente Allies. In a few communities, fierce labor- 
struggles arose and there were a few riots in which there 
was bloodshed, attended with the lost of human lives. In 
the first instances, these riots occured at places where the 
foreign population predominated and were largely among 
them. They were first brought on as labor disputes, and 
officers of the law, on duty protecting plants and the build- 
ings, were attacked and a few of them killed. It seemed as 
if there was an acute desire to hold back the output of oil 
plants, mills, and other industrial works to prevent aid 
going from the United States to the Entente Allies. Then 
came a series of dreadful explosions and the burning of large 
plants in various sections of the country. In the minds of 
a majority of the American people, there was firm belief 
that these criminal and destructive actions were jobs per- 
petrated by those who wished to prevent supplies being 
manufactured in our country that were primarily made to 
sell to the nations allied with Great Britain against Ger- 
many and her allies. 

The Industrial Workers of the World, commonly known 
as the I. W. W., was organized before the war and, when 
the war against Germany, was declared by this country, 
this organization seemed to be taking a leading part in 
hindering and obstructing industry in its increased obliga- 
tions and responsibilities. It also seemed arrayed against 
the Federal Government fighting all of its plans for pre- 
paredness and military efficiency; and along with the per- 
nicious activities of the I. W. W. there was an underground 
German Propaganda. Finally, the Federal Government, 
with an alertness and vigilance that showed that it would 
not be trifled with, seized hold of the I. W. W. men where- 


88 . 


THE EXODUS. 


ever they were found and could obtain sufficient facts that 
proved they were guilty of seeking to undermine the power 
and strength of the nation to succeed in the World War. 

When the United States finally entered the World-War 
on the side of Entente Allies, there was disposition in some 
few instances to question the loyalty of some few of the 
Negro Race; but it soon became too evident that the entire 
Negro Race was as loyal and faithful to his country, and as 
determined and firm to die for the flag and to uphold the 
honor of the nation, as the most favored and fortunate 
white man in the country. As Crispus Attucks sprang 
forth among the very first to fight and die to establish the 
United States of America as a free and independent nation, 
each and every Negro, North, South, East, and West, stood 
as ready and willing to fight and die as was that early and 
first of the American volunteer heroes who vras a black 
man. It seemed fitting that soon after President Woodrow 
Wilson met Germany’s February blockade, as foretold in 
tneir communication to our Government, by announcing 
that any overt act of violence against any person or proper- 
ty of our nation on the high seas would be tantemount to a 
declaration of war, that a Negro seaman of Baltimore was 
the very first American to meet death by an overt act of 
Germany. 

In July, 1917, the despotic and tyrannical spirit of 
Labor-Unionism in the North reached its bloody climax 
when innocent and hard- toiling Negroes were the victims of 
arson and murder at East St. Louis, Missouri. 


A JIM CROW CAR FOR OTTR MAIDEN 


89 . 


CHAPTER XXV. 

A JIM CROW CAR FOR OUR MAIDEN. 

It was Indian Summer, that delightful season of the 
year that signified many things in the North, and particu- 
larly at Buffalo. Tourist and traffickers, vacationists and 
wanderers, were making their final efforts and last stands 
for pleasure and travel at Niagara Falls. Buffalo, the ad- 
joining and nearest metropolitan city, was literally packed 
with curious, energetic zestful human beings. Each train, 
every large lake passenger-boat and electric car on car, 
added its numbers to the vast concourse. There was com- 
ing and there was going, but in all shone Americanism, 
pure and undefiled. That is equality of opportunity for 
the rich as well as the poor, for the black as well as the 
white, to purchase and freely enjoy every comfort and 
convenience of Common Carriers, of the Railroad stations 
and steamboats, which exist in such abundance and are so 
efficiently and magnificientiy operated in that genuine, real 
democracy, the Imperial State of New York. 

At this peculiar zestful season of the year, at this high 
tide of travel, a dainty, brown, American maiden, a native 
daughter of Buffalo, who was born and bred in that Com- 
monwealth of free schools, academies, colleges and univer- 
sities for all of its people, rose up on the Autumn morning 
of the first long trip of her life, to travel from the North 
to the South, from her home in New York to her chosen 
place of service in Georgia. Thelma Marshall's heart beat 
and danced with rapturious delight as she anticipated 
teaching her own Race children down South in Georgia. 
Thelma was still more enraptured when she thought of 
teaching on Lamart's River Bottoms where Frederick 
thought her teaching was most needed. It was her last 
day in her free home, in the glorious and marvelous North, 
and many considerations of kindness were tended to her in 
manifestation of the ineffeceable marks she had made in 
the hearts and upon the minds of her numerous friends. 


90 . 


THE EXODUS. 


All that part of the day that she spent at her home was 
crowded with pleasant happenings. Members of her class, 
those with whom she had played and romped at school, 
studied with in class-rooms and finally graduated with, came 
in singlely and in groups and bade her FAREWELL. The 
Library Staff had a luncheon for her and they too bade her 
FAREWELL. The Principal of the Academy from which 
she had been graduated, arranged to send an automobile 
for her after the luncheon, in which she was taken to a 
Lake Pier and entertained on a luxurious private yacht, 
by leading Faculty members, and they also bade her 
t< AREWELL. At the last part of the day, her Race friends 
came, those who were closest to her by the most tender 
ties of co-related association, feelings, and history, members 
of her inner set, of her Sunday School, of her church, and 
next in degree of relationship to the members of her own 
household and family. These bade her FAREWELL. 

Mr. Marshall, Thelma’s father, secured her a ticket 
for her destination and provided Pullman accommodations 
for her for the greater part of the way. “Now, Thel,” said 
he, “you travel over the Pennsylvania’s Buffalo Washington 
Special to Washington, D. C. ; you have a short stay there 
r.nd then leave Washington over the Southern’s Washing- 
ion- Jacksonville Limited, for a continuous and straight ride 
Macon, Geoigia; you get off your Pullman at Macon and 
from there you ride in a local first-class passenger train to 
Ilawkinsville, the end of your railroad journey. 

“FAREWELL!” said Thelma repeating the words so 
often expressed to her during the day. She wondered why 
some. of her friends had not said “Good Bye” instead of the 
heavy and ponderous “FAREWELL.” Curious and young, 
she wished at the instant to know the full meaning of 
“FAREWELL,” and just what it signified. As her people 
were pessimistic about her venturing South and viewed with 
alarm and skeptisism the outcome of it, she kept counsel 
with herself and stole away to the library to refresh her 
knowledge of memory on Webster’s definitions of “FARE- 


A JIM CROW CAR FOR OUR MAIDEN 


91 


WELL.” She found the verb part of the word thus defined: 

1. “To move forward, to travel.” 

2. “To be attended with any circumstances or trend 

of events.” 

3. “To feed; to be entertained; to be given a. good table 

or courteous treatment.” 

4. “To proceed in a train of consequences good or bad.” 

She found the noun part of that word defined as fol- 
lows : “The price of passage for conveying persons by land 
or sea.” She knew the common meaning of the word 
“FAREWELL” and would have given little or no thought 
to it but for the fact that it was “FAREWELL” from so 
many groups of experienced and learned friends. 

When Mr. Ingraham, her sister's affiance, the young 
lawyer came, she decided that it was the nature of his 
calling to counsel others, to give good advice, and to fathom 
mysteries; so she told him how often the word, “FARE- 
WELL” had been given and repeated to her during the 
day. 

“Why that's not strange, Thelma. It is too well known 
and understood that when a free and intelligent Race Person 
crosses south of the Mason and Dixon line, it means a fight 
to save humiliation, self-respect, soul, and too often life it- 
self, and your friends, both white and black, merely wished 
that you be put on guard. If you must fight, you be sure 
astonished when I hear that some veneered, white brute 
you one of the late automatic revolvers. I shall not be 
to do it well. I shall hasten to a hardware store and send 
down there in Georgia will place you in sore need of it.” 

New and strange feelings thrilled her being as the 
*rain sped through New York into Pennsylvania to Mary- 
land and Washington, D. C. It was dark when she reached 
the Capitol of the nation. She desired to see and under- 
stand this central point of authority and power of the na- 
tion; a place neither of the North nor of the South; in 
some things, too little of the one ; in some things, too much 


92 


THE EXODUS. 


of the other. In the great, white marble Union 
Station, there our dainty brown girl strolled, scenting some- 
how, in her mind and soul, the force of the border-land 
where she was. Even in the Capitol of the nation, the 
home of the Chief Executive, the supreme and final seat of 
national law-making, judging, and enforcement, she sensed 
a peculiar difference between Washington and Buffalo. 
There was no separation of Americans merely on chamical 
or physical basis of vision in the Union Station there, but 
arrogant, autocratic, tyrannical breath seem already to 
creep over her. Adhering to instructions given to her, she 
went downstairs and found the Pullman in which she was 
to ride into the heart of the South. The porter smiling 
broadly looked at her tickets and directed her to the berth 
that was to be hers, then he said, 

“Whose yer travelin’ fer er wid, Missus?” 

She answered, “Miss Thelma Marshall.” 

“Dat’s right, de Marshalls mighty, granfolks, you 
lucky chile!” 

The lucky chile was safely and securely tucked in bed 
when the porter came in and the train started. The next 
morning, she arose early and began to view the attractive 
and picturesque scenery with the dawn of day. By obser- 
ving marks and names, she concluded Virginia had been 
traversed and that the train was speeding through North 
Carolina. She was the only Race passenger in the Pullman. 
When the waiter came calling breakfast, the porter halted 
him and, when both stood near Thelma, he stated, “Eds 
chile b’longs to the Marshalls; fine family; take her in dere 
an take de bes keer uv her!” The waiter bowed and said 
he would return with menu card. He soon returned and 
Thelma selected what she desired to eat for breakfast. The 
waiter told her to come into the Dining Room in ten or 
fifteen minutes. Seated at a table all to herself she saw all 
around her white people most of whom spoke in unaccus- 
tomed accents. Near her table she heard this inquiry, 
^‘Nice looking Negro, whose girl is she?” “The porter told 


A JIM CROW CAR FOR OUR MAIDEN 


93 


me she belongs to the Marshalls. I guess she must be maid 
and they couldn’t get space in their car for her.” They had 
previously smiled very friendly upon her and wished her 
a fine breakfast. This unusual and wholesome politeness to 
her by rich Southernors, strange and unknown to her, made 
Thelma indeed a very happy creature as it was something 
New Yorkers, did not as a rule show to strangers, white 
or black. This caused her to ask the porter who they were 
and he immediately answered, ‘'Quality of the South, the 
very best quality!” 

The close of the day found her in Georgia and that 
night she was placed off the Limited at Macon at a small, 
inadequate, incommodious station with an illkept, untidy, 
poorly lit and furnished, cold colored waiting room, for her 
resting place, the first of its kind she had ever seen or 
heard of. She was told that the local on which she was to 
ride would leave the next morning. A cool, dirty waiting 
room and a hard plank, filthy seat did not appeal to her as 
fit things for health of body or contentment of mind, so she 
promenaded around the station to benefit by exercises. 
But she was amazed to find on the attractive side of the 
station, that portion which opened both to the city and 
trains, a clean, neat nicely heated and lighted, waiting room 
and a very inviting lunch-room. Then she remembered the 
solemn entreaties to her and the warnings that had been 
given her of the South. She pondered over the causes 
whether they were geographical or governmental, thinking 
of the nature and kind of governments, republics, demo- 
cratic and monarchial, as well as oligarchial, and she won- 
dered when the government of the South differing so much 
from that of the North, would be properly classified. 

The next morning, Thelma Marshall stood on a long 
bridge near the little, mean, un-American, Southern station 
at Macon, and, as the sun rose, sore from walking in circles 
and worried as she was, rejoiced to see the splendid sun 
rays playing on the waters of the Ocmulgee as it winded 
its sluggish way to the Altamaha and the sea. As the time 


94 


THE EXODUS 


passed Race people poured into the dirty, cool “Colored 
Waiting Room” that remained entirely neglected that 
morning while the “White Waiting Room” was swept very 
early, scoured, scrubbed, and heated. She was directed to 
the front portion of the car next to the baggage-car. On 
entering that first half of the car, she found that it had 
received r io more attention than the un-American, Southern 
“Colored Waiting Room” that she had just left, and that 
the conductor and newsboy were cleaning and stacking their 
equipment on the rear seats of the first half of the car. She 
selected a center seat and, after soiling a handkerchief in 
making things around her decent threw the hankerchief out 
of the window and sat down. There was but one rude toilet 
on that half of the car. Bold, boisterous, and coarse white 
men indifferently pushed themselves through the first half 
of the car where she sat to the other half of the same car 
that they were using as a smoker and from which was dis- 
tinctly heard their loud guffaws and blackguard language. 
Before the train left, the little mean, un-American Southern 
station, colored passengers, all of whom had paid first-rate 
fare for their tickets, had come into the first half of the 
car in greater numbers than its seating capacity could ac- 
commodate. When some of these made ready to sit in 
either one of the two rear seats, the porter bawled out, “Ut, 
ut ! Don’t sit in dem seats ; dey is reserved !” On the very 
eve of the departure of the train, a mother came with her 
children, one an infant in her arms, and there was no seat 
in the first half of the car for her and her children. Observ- 
ing the two rear seats to be vacant and unoccupied as to pas- 
sengers, she took them, placed the two larger children on 
the right of the aisle and sat with the infant on the left, 
having pushed baskets and boxes aside and under the seats 
n possession of the women and her children. With the un- 
mistakable chivalry and gallantry of a Southern conductor 
of a Dixieland Common Carrier of passengers for hire, this 
true and typical representative of his profession, actually 
turned red in the face when he beheld the intrusion on the 
part of this member of the weaker sex with three tiny chil- 


A JIM CROW CAR FOR OUR MAIDEN 


95 


dren, one an infant in her arms and he shouted, “Ole’ ’oman, 
gee! gee! gee! git up. You know you caint sit there. 
Them's always white folks' seats!" The woman was has- 
tened out of the seats. Instantly, Thelma's hand sought for 
the new automatic revolver in her hand bag, but sober 
after thoughts recalled to her mind the repeated “FARE- 
WELL" of her friends and her long cherished purpose to 
teach her own Race children in the South. She called the 
mother to her side and gave up her seat, choosing, after a 
night of walking, a long ride standing. 

As the train rolled on from one station to another, 
fresh passengers came in with tickets or cash for first-class 
FARE. As things grew more and more jammed, the con- 
ductor grew more and more insulting, overbearing and 
rude and to a point Thelma considered it not only barbarous 
but criminal to operate a train anywhere in such a manner. 
When she got off the train she saw in each one of the two 
cars in which white people were passengers more vacant 
seats than there were seats in that half car on which she 
rode into Hawkinsville. 


96 


THE EXODUS 


CHAPTER XXVI. 

MARTYR IN DEFENSE OF VIRTUE AND 
WOMANHOOD. 

There never was a person who threw all of self more 
completely into her work than Thelma Marshall did as 
teacher of the plantation-children at the home of her hero, 
first and only loved one. Never did a people feel the ele- 
vating and helpful presence of a stranger more. It was 
just another repetition of Ceasar’s historical trip to Gaul, 
Thelma Marshall came, saw, and conquered. All had 
thought that in their older, less pretty, and winsome 
teachers of past periods that they had the best that could 
be gotten for them from any where; but to their sur- 
prise, this rare gem of youth, refinement, and wisdom came, 
and the sweetness of her noble and pure life, and the 
brightness of her sunny disposition charmed the whole 
community. 

Thelma boarded with the Lewises and every member 
of the family present thought the family had attained its 
highest possible eminence in the community by having her 
at their home. Adoration and devotion fell to this young 
woman from them. They knew that Frederick loved her, 
and as lofty as she was and seemed to them, this made her 
still dearer. 

Pollard Lewis has grown up to promising age and size, 
and, in his plans and thoughts, he was looking forward to 
the eventual day, when, like Frederick and Theodore, he 
could leave for College to secure more extensive training. 
He had chosen farming for his life's calling and was bent 
on securing the knowledge that he could acquire, in order 
to be a highly successful farmer, and very serviceable, alike 
to his people and to his community. The desire for more 
work quickened him, in his efforts of preparation to go to 
College. While he was in this mood and the rosiest hues of 
his sky of hope seemed golden and rich with promises, the 


MARTYR IN DEFENSE VIRTUE AND WOMANHOOD 97 


younger Robert Lamart who had just returned to the “Big 
House” from off a long trip, had without mercy, recklessly 
and wildly, ran on young Clark when he was riding a 
young horse that was considered the most promising horse 
bred for many a day in all the country for some distance. 
He offered neither excuses nor apologies, but sent the 
Lamart agent to the Clark home with ample money and 
paid for the horse. 

“It's damn, rank injustice, Pol, and you had better be 
careful of Bob Lamart, or he will not only be running down 
horses and paying for them with moneys, but he will be 
running down human beings, as his damn, conceited kind 
think that money will pay the price of any and everything. 
I would not have sold Nebo for any amount of money, and 
now he is gone, Pol, I swear to heaven, that's the last I 
am going to take off Beaurgard Lamart. The very next 
thing of ours that he recklessly draws blood from, I swear 
to heaven, HI make him pay back in his own blood, so help 
me God!” 

Leonidas Clark spoke with arms, with eyes, with voice 
and soul. His strong, young right arm shot forth time after 
time-; with his left hand, he violently smote his breast; his 
feet were firmly planted upon the ground; he stood erect, 
clean-cut, lithe, and handsome. 

“The Lord knows I don't want to argue with you, 
Leon, but all the Lamarts generally have their way, and if 
1 were you, I wouldn't make any more front yard, open air 
speeches on Beauregard ; it's dangerous. Go down into your 
cellar and think it out on the scoundrel, if you cain't pray 
it out on high ground. Pa says everybody else has got to 
give the Lamarts all the big road and the goat-trails, to 
save their necks, except your Pa; he is the only man on 
earth that has bucked and beat the Lamart's, broad and 
open and in the plain day time. I've got some opinions 
about this Lamart and his men and I am not going to trust 
my own cares with them.” 


98 


THE EXODUS. 


The Anglo-Saxon was not as patient and philosophical 
under cold-blooded and self-evident wrongs as was the cal- 
culating, painstaking young American Negro. 

“I’ve sworn, Pol, and God knows, even if I wished to, 
that I can not retract, I cannot take it back!” 

One afternoon, after she had closed her school, as was 
her custom, Thelma hastened to the hut of one of her 
pupils confined at home with sickness. She made her visit 
and, after she had left the hut and entered the road leading 
homeward, an automobile dashed up and a pale faced young 
man, with goggles on, gazed brazenly upon her with much 
fierceness as he passed her. He halted his machine and 
yelled, “Heh ! heh ! heh ! to /her, but ignoring the indecent 
and bold challenge, she quickened her speed. 

'By Jove, what a pretty little Nigger!” he ejaculated. 
"Say, Sis, you look good to me. This is Robert Beauregard 
Lee Lamart. Don’t you want to be my gal?” 

The horror of his beastliness and a fervent desire to 
have and use Mr. Ingraham’s new automatic clashed in her 
mind as she gathered her skirts and fled. In her ears and 
way down in her soul, there continued to ring his brazen 
laugh, Ha! ha! ha! my pretty little brown bird, I’ll catch 
you yet and clip your wings ; else you stop teaching my little 
kinky haired Nigs around here!” 

She at last stumbled up the steps of the Lewis home 
and panting fell in the parlor. The entire family gathered 
around her. When revived, she told the evening’s ghastly 
tale. Clustered and kneeling about her, they all spoke to 
console and reconcile her, except Pollard, who with gnashed 
teeth, his hands rhrust deep into his pockets, his feet 
stamping the floor, turned his face from all to hide the tears 
which burned his brown face more than August sun ever 
had. Rushing down into the basement, he hid himself in its 
obscurity of darkness. "So” he muttered, "It is not the 
Mood of horses of ours, nor human beings that this Lamart 
dog wants as much as he does Miss Thelma’s virtue, and she 


MARTYR IN DEFENSE OF VIRTUE AND WOMANHOOD 99 


my brother’s sweetheart, whom he is waiting to marry. 
, I’ll not swear to heaven like Leon, nor to hell, I, Pollard 
Lewis, shall act. Miss Thelma’s virtue must be protected, 
if the cost means that I be burned or lynched !” 

A few days after the outrage upon Thelma, Leonidas 
and Pollard came upon each other. Both had their hands 
thrust deep into their pockets and appeared to be dejected, 
gloomy, and melancholy. 

“Hellow, Leon.” . 

Howdy, Pol. Say listen, Pol, I’m civil and a Christian, 
God knows I am, but, Pol, I just can’t stand that dirty dog, 
Beauregard much longer. My brothers are at Mercer which 
Beauregard spoke of in scorn and derision, saying it is a 
poor, white-trash school and that Southern gentlemen are 
found exclusively in but one school, and that is Princeton 
from which he graduated ; so I must protect my sisters as 
they wont tell Father!” 

“Has he done anything to your sisters, Leon?” 

“Yes, Beulah had to spit in his face on the highway!” 

“What else did he do to her; what did he say to her?” 
shouted Pollard, intensely excited and placing his hand 
on Leon’s shoulders. 

“Nothing yet extreme, but she didn’t give him chance, 
he drew up his machine by her, raised his hat, and leaped 
out, grinning, when she knocked his gogles off, spat in his 
face, and ran home to me!” 

“Leon,” whispered the brown boy, “will you buy me an 
automatic 32, S. & W. ? Do so please and I’ll give you all 
the money that I have saved up for going off to study farm- 
ing in a College!” 

“I’ll get you the gun, but I won’t take your money, 
Pol!” 

Thelma, threatened and warned to FAREWELL, with 
body and soul in jeopardy, had to limit her services in the 
community strictly to schoolroom work. She was careful 
to go to and from school surrounded by as many of her 
students as possible, and with convenient bag always 


100 


THE EXODUS. 


grasped in her hand. Unknown to her, Pollard was her 
ever faithful De Artaghn, always on the alert, observing 
everything that took place within sight or hearing. One 
afternoon at the close of school, when a majority of the 
children had fled away, Thelma was the last person to 
descend the steps of the school to the ground. One of her 
boys, Oscar, the son of Old Man Adams, with a shining 
dollar clasped in one of his hands that he held in his pocket, 
stepped briskly from behind the side of the school and 
placed a note into Thelma’s hands, then dashed away. It 
was an appeal, an urgent call for Thelma’s presence at the 
bed of the sick child who declared she would not die in 
peace unless she spoke to her teacher for the last time be- 
fore she passed into the Great Beyond. Resolutely casting 
aside all fears, Thelma dismissed her children attendants, 
felt the solid surface of the automatic in her bag, and 
marched erect and straight, farther and farther from her 
home to the home of the dying pupil where she thought she 
thought she was supremely needed. Imagine her surprise 
when she found the supposed sick Ophelia, very near nor- 
mal and able to be playing with her mother’s infant. 
Thelma sensed a deep-laid plot and knowing that darkness 
would soon be on, she hastened out and homeward. When 
she got to where a short road led into the bigger one that 
she was traveling, young Lamart stepped out and attempted 
to halt her, urging as he grinned, “Oh ! now, come, on, Sis, 
a good dandy ride in the car of a first-class white man won’t 
HURT you. I’ve a bank roll in my pocket and plenty of 
good wine in my car.” 

But Thelma has succeded in opening her bag and held 
in her right hand a deadly looking weapon. “You damn, 
little fool!” Lamart shouted, seizing her right wrist with 
his left hand and with his right attempting to drag her 
into his machine. But her Yankee courage and superior 
wisdom asserted themselves. She swung, partly lifted by 
his strength, upward a bit and sunk her teeth into his face 
m the mean time with a quick lurch she swung both feet 


MARTYR IN DEFENSE OF VIRTUE AND WOMANHOOD 101 


into his stomach, with all her might. He fell back with 
curses and groans as Pollard Lewis dashed forward. 
Lamart was rising, curing with a flashing gun in his hand. 
Pollard was about to draw his gun when Thelma, with 
right arm extended, shot. 

This young scion of the South who boasted of his 
Princeton exclusiveness fell in death at the hand of plucky 
Thelma Marshall who killed him, defending herself from his 
attempt, first to rape her, then to murder her.” 

“Great God! Miss Thelma, you have killed him and I 
intended to save you myself!” 

“I didn’t know you were so close at hand, Pollard; I 
meant never to surrender to him while I lived; friends of 
mine on the last day I was home told me FAREWELL !, and 
now I see that it is all FAREWELL with me !” She burst 
out in a flood of uncontrolable mingling ofpassion and grief. 
“Oh! Frederick, Frederick, Frederick, my love, where are 
you, why are you not now here to save me!” 

“Don’t fear, Miss Thelma,” gasped Pollard, “I’ll die for 
you, for if there’s ever been a woman that’s been tried and 
still is true, it’s you, it’s you! I want you to live for my 
orother. Rush home, I’ll fix itall on me. Tell the folks at 
home to have you there all the time right after school. 
Get Oscar Adams, who slipped you the note, early and the 
first thing next morning and scare him so that he will 
never open his mouth. You can rely on the Freeman family 
vviiere you went to see Ophelia to do the right thing. Ex- 
change guns with me and let mine be found as it is at 
home. I am too glad to give my life to rid the country of 
a dirty white skunk such as Beauregard Lamart!” 


102 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XXVII. 

A BAD NIGGER LYNCHED. 

The very next morning that John the Baptist of many 
forecasted acts, spread throughout the length and breadth 
of the United States news of the cold-blooded robbery and 
murder of Mr. Robert Lee Bearegard Lamart, the exem- 
plary and worthy son of the father of that name who was 
not only the first and wealthiest citizen of his community 
and county, but the oldest and best known gentleman of 
the South’s aristocratic and noble families. The robbery 
was done by Pollard Lewis, a good for nothing and idling 
young Negro who took advantage of Mr. Lamart s benevo- 
lence to a sick Negro family on his father’s plantation, by 
the n tme of Freeman. The young Lewis Negro waylaid 
Mr. Li ’mart just after he had left, ministering to the needs 
of the Freeman family, and, not satisfied withhaving him 
hand over the full pocket-book that he was known to carry 
at all times, the Negro brute shot him in cold blood, and, 
throwing him out of his car upon thehighway drove off in 
his machine. The Negro, Lewis threatened to take the 
lives of the Freeman family as he drove by the hut, but 
the grateful old darkey sat as a guardover the dead body 
of his young master while Aunt Lucy, his wife, gave the 
alarm. Owing to the brutality of the murder and the clean, 
generous, and noble life of the murdered young man, speedy 
justice by lynching is inevitable. Mr. Lamart was a Prince- 
ton graduate and the only son of a Confederate Officer. 
Every sheriff of the adjoining counties has been notified by 
wire and it is only the question of a short time when the 
Negro must pay as tame settlement for his hell-black crime 
as the determined, righteous friends of the murdered young 
gentleman shall conceive to meet out to him. 

Although young, Pollard Lewis knew the marshes, 
swamps and underbrush of Pulaski County sufficiently well 
to maintain himself as fugitive for an indefinite period, ail 


A BAD NIGGER LYNCHED 


103 


things considered, he deicded that the sooner the vengeance 
and wrath of Lamart’s friends be apeased, the safety and 
security of his people at his home and Miss Thelma Mar- 
shall would be assured. 

He was not unacquainted with some of the history of 
noted martyrs and his unflinching resolve was to meet 
death smiling and in brave and manly way. Se he appeared 
in the automobile, the day after Lamart’s death and dashed 
along the other pide of the County over a public highway 
long enough for an alarm to be sent out concerning his 
whereabouts. Then he retraced his journey near enough 
to the scene for the tradgdy to get a true version of it to 
Leonidas Clark. On the next day, he made the wild dash 
that brought on an unjustified and terrible lynching of an 
innocent human being, who was ambitious, aspiring, honest, 
noble, and true. He died charged with the murder of an 
idler, a conceited braggart, an indolent* proflgate, and a 
worthless fellow, who went to his doom and grave with the 
dirty desire burning in his bosom and upon his h^art to 
rape and murder the daintiest, purest, sweetest Yankee girl 
that Almighty God had ever called away from her com- 
fortable and protected home to do Civil duty and Christian 
service in Dixieland. 


104 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

OTHER GEORGIA LYNCHINGS. 

The lynching-bee once started in Georgia did not stop 
with taking the life of innocent young Pollard Lewis, but 
Jew as well as Gentile, white as well as blacjc, were has- 
tened to death in its inhuman and uncivilized way. So 
lynching spread its carnal self in bold defiance of consti- 
tuted law and organized society from one place to another. 
Females felt victims to its furious reign. The ghastly busi- 
ness grew fearfully and one never knew when an unfor- 
tunate weave of cloudy circumstances would call into mo- 
tion the unbridled and unchained furies of. lynching. 

Thoughtful men and women in and out of office beheld 
the reapings of this conscienceless Monster. The humble 
and unfortunate black man, charged as brute ?rapist of a 
white woman, was an excuse that gave too few victims. 
Other charges must yield more victims and females and 
even whites must be thrown in the bloody caldron of lynch- 
ing and pay toll to the rapacious longing for innocent human 
blood. When back and obscure wilderness corners failed 
in their offerings, the old, well settled town and its jail; 
the Capitol City of the State and its accused, and ev$n the 
well-guarded and protected State Penitentary must furnish 
victims for its ghastly work. 


TORRENTS AND TERRORS 


105 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

TORRENTS AND TERRORS. 

Tfiv' good of the South slumbered, the good of the 
South thought and proposed with no effective acts to make 
Dixielands just, its people democratic, its institutions free 
and its law supreme. As did the Lewis family for Robert 
Lam arc on his rich yielding River Bottoms, before their 
deliverance from peonage and slavery by William Clark, 
self-made Southern white man, thousands of other Negro 
families toiled from January in to January out in other 
rich River Bottoms of the Southland, in involuntary servi- 
tude for such aristocratic, noble Southern gentlemen as 
Robert Lamart. 

Abraham Lincoln had made, signed and issued THE 
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, but that was a mere 
scrap of paper technically dissolving chattel ownership in 
Negroes. Aristocratic and noble Southern white gentlemen 
such as Robert Lamart did not mean to allow any law of 
the United States Government to deprive them of the actual 
wealth that control and ownership of Negroes gave. The 
Race was originally brought from Africa and placed on their 
plantations to give them ease and wealth; from time to 
time, the replenishing of the Race had been for the same 
purposes, and for the River Bottoms of the South in the 
driving hard hands and iron hearts of such men the system 
must be perpetuated and never brought to an end. 

Just before the World-War came and along with it, 
the River Bottoms of the South were flooded by unusual 
torrents of rain. Crops and homes were alike overflowed 
and washed away. In many cases, human lives were lost. 
The Lamarts and their overseers found it ruinous to their 
depleted stores to longer force and \j\d their Negro peons 
and slaves in involuntary service by ingenious craft or cun- 
ningly devised scheme; as between tneir own ruin and the 
putting into effect and operation Abraham Lincolns 
Emancipation Proclamation, notwithstanding it was a hall 


106 


THE EXODUS. 


century after it was issued, Jehovah's Torrents and Terror » 
forced these Southern gentlemen to a choice that otherwise 
they never would have made, and they accepted the freeing 
of these Negroes. In this way a monumental success was 
achieved for the law of the land as regards these many 
slaves and what the Federal Government had been unable 

to do, or had failed to do was accomplished. 

♦ 

The Lamarts and their overseers, like the Egyptians 
in fright of God's Destroying Angel, begged and insisted 
on the Negroes getting away from their long imprisonment 
in the rich River Bottoms. They flocked to the large cities 
to the industrial centers of the North, East, and West, made 
ready for their fortutious coming by enlarged capacities 
and usefulness, the need of large numbers of workers and 
the cutting off of foreign emigrants, all the direct results 
of the World's Great War. 


i 


BEFORE THE FLOODS CAME AND AFTER 


107 


CHAPTER XXX. 

BEFORE THE FLOODS CAME AND AFTER 

Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, and the late 
Booker T. Washington are world-leaders and men of such 
standing that only the folly of the foolish will dare to com 
trovert the sincerity of their purposes and the soundness 
of their opinion. Each one of these men sought, before the 
floods came and the World- War was upon us, to unify 
American purpose and thought on what is termed the Negro 
Question and to get the South aroused to that appreciation 
to the many Negroes to the manor bom upon its hearth so 
as to insure to that Race Equality of opportunity in com- 
mercial and industrial life and an equitable distribution of 
governmental benefits. But the South was very Bourbon 
stubborn ; the South evaded this issue ; the South procrasti- 
nated and prevaricated, and the South refused to do these 
just, right, and American things: in other words, the South 
refused to do the will of the constitution and preferred 
rather than Americanism Southernism, by what you will 
or may see, there were too few William Clarks and too many 
Robert Lamarts. 

The North was truly democratic in its educational and 
political facilities. These were offered, as all democracies 
do, freely to all, black and white alike. But too sad for the 
American Negro, after being educated and entertained, he 
must have paying and serviceable work to do. When 
through educating the Negro, the North too often and 
largely gave the generous but get you no where “FARE- 
WELL.” 

It was more than an episode but an epoch in the Na- 
tional life when Henry Grady pledged in that cradle of 
American Liberty and Independence and the hub of the 
nation's intellectual life, Boston, Massachusetts, that there 
be no more North and no more South, but one united, com- 
mon country. Had Henry Grady been a statesman instead 


108 


THE EXODUS. 


of an orator, the Old Southern Scales of prejudice which 
count the Negro out from Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty, 
would have fallen from his blinded eyes, and he would have 
had a clear vision of democracy as she only can be, equally 
benefitting all of mankind without any regard to color, creed 
or previous condition of servitude. 

Booker T. Washington, in his famous oration at the 
Cotton States and International Exposition at Atlanta, 
Georgia, with a profound consideration of the unfair and 
unwise Southern Race prejudice, asked that the black and 
white peoples of the South be as the hand and fingers of 
the human body; united as a whole people in government 
and industry but separate as the fingers in social affairs. 
He appealed to the South as she had never before been ap- 
pealed to, as she never again will be appealed to. “To those 
of the white race who look to theincoming of those of for- 
eign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity 
of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say 
To my own race! “Cast down your bucket where you are. 
Cast it down among the 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits 
you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days 
when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your 
fireside. Cast down your bucket among these people who 
have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, 
cleaned your forests, built your railroads and cities, and 
brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth and 
helped make possible this magnificent representation of the 
progress of the South! 

“There is no defense or security for any of us except 
in the efforts and highest intelligence and developement of 
all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the 
fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts turned into 
stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful 
and intelligent citizen. Efforts or means so invested will 
pay a thousand per cent interest. These efforts will be 
twice blessed, blessing him that gives and him that takes. 


BEFORE AND AFTER THE FLOODS CAME 


109 


“There is no escape through law of man or God from 
the inevitable: 

“The laws of changeless justice bind 
Oppressor with oppressed; 

And close as sin and suffering joined 
We march to fate abreast.” 

An appeal, more direct, sensible and directly understood 
could not have been made to the actions and hearts of any 
people. It did not increase the Clarks, but the Lamarts’ as 
King Pharaoh to the appeals of Moses, grew alarmed, more 
crafty, and persistent. 

On the other hand, representing as well a life of hum- 
ble beginnings, struggle, and toil, as of achievement, suc- 
cess, and wealth, a citizen of the democratic North, in an- 
swering to the discrimination and prescription of the North- 
ern Labor-Unions and the fiery declarations of the domi- 
nant politicians of the South that, “This is a white man’s 
country and by God white men shall rule it!” Andrew 
Carnegie enthusiastically declared at Washington. D. C., 
“We need you here; I get tired of hearing this senseless 
rot by un-American people who do not know, or will not 
understand what a democracy is, and what a free people 
must stand for, that the Negroes ought either to be kept 
less intelligent than white people, or ought to be sent from 
Their native heaths here in the United States, to foreign 
shores. The question is, not what we can do with you, but 
how many Negroes the United States of America can get!” 

Above and beyond every other man on earth is Theo- 
dore Roosevelt. No other American, since the days of 
Father Abraham, the Author of our Emancipation, has 
been so active, intelligent, strenuous, useful, and wise as 
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt! When face to face with the 
grinding and un-American spirit of the Northern Labor- 
Unions to shut Negroes out from equal chances to work to 
earn an American livelihood and conditions, the peonage of 
the Lamarts of the South, the discriminations and proscrip- 


110 


THE EXODUS. 


tions of Negro-hating Southern politicians, he proved him- 
self all man and statesman and, mincing nothing declared, 
“In America the door of opportunity shall not be closed 
to any man on account of his race!” 

When the floods came poignant pains had long been the 
uoons of those who loved and devoutly desired real demo- 
cracy in the United’ States. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt 
was no longer Chief Executive at Washington, D. C. A 
Southern gentleman, born in Virginia, bred in Georgia, and 
a graduate of Princeton University, ruied there. And under 
the sway of his rule, every Negro American who had been 
called to executive service for the National Government 
was put out of office; every Negro American seeker for 
executive service for the. National Government was coldly 
refused. The Lamarts’ of the South rejoiced. Men of their 
Southern breed and of their kind controlled the National 
Government and were “In the saddle,” from the backward- 
ness and obscurity of Lamart’s River Bottoms to the De- 
partment of Government at Washington, D. C., and the 
Executive Mansion of supreme authority, did color preju- 
dice spread itself and become emphasized and trenchant. 
This odd and strange inconsistency and repudiation on the 
part of the biggest, greatest Republic of the New World 
that without ceasing boasts of its democracy became a 
thing peculiarly marked and noted throughout the civilized 
world. Two distinct events eternally marked and noted 
throughout the civilized world, mark the shame of our 
nation as regards the unfortunate Negro when under the 
Southern regime. 

A delegation of liberty-loving Negro- Americans re- 
minded the President of his promises to do the clean and 
upright thing when he was a candidate for the Presidency; 
of his subsequent promise after he was inaugurated Presi- 
dent of the United States, and of the continuation of the 
infamous “Jim Crow Orders,” in some of the Departments 
of the National Government at Washington, D. C. The 
president gave to the world the sublime spectacle of his 


BEFORE THE FLOODS CAME AND AFTER 


111 


becoming angry with the Chairman of the Delegation, and 
in a way, drove the delegation out of the Nation’s Executive 
Mansion. The courageous chairman was warned not to 
come back. Right on the heels of this event the Turkish 
Ambassador to the United States was found guilty because 
his government had the mote of atrocities, despotism, and 
oppression in its autocratic eye, but the Mohamedan diplo- 
mat at Washington shouted back at our Government with 
universal voice “Oh Allah ! The audicious can’t and brazen 
hypocricy of these professed followers of Thomas Jefferson, 
Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ, and His Golden Rule!” He 
then challenged our President to take the beam of Race 
Prejudice, discrimination, and prescription out of his eye, 
and stated that it ill became a nation that invented “Jim 
Crowism,” disfranchisement, lynching, and segregation in 
a boasted Republic to question the internal affairs of an 
absolute monarchy or to throw mud at Turkey for its 
alleged Armenian massacres. 

When the floods came, the North and East and West 
invited the South’s Negroes, saying, “Here are free schools 
from kindergarden through our State Universities, and 
great Colleges, except Princeton University, swinging as 
wide open for you as for the whites; and, likewise, free 
libraries, art galleries, museums, public parks, auditoriums, 
natatoriums, bathing and swimming places. All of our citi- 
zens vote and are not disfranchised by indirect customs 
and dirty subterfuges, interwoven in unconstitutional 
statutes, grinding handouts of a peon! 

But the South took a startling and immediate appeal- 
ing attitude; said Negroes would freeze to death in the 
North and not be understood; that it cost too much to live 
there and that the friends of the Negrowere the Lamarts. 
Salable Negro editors and preachers were quickly corraled 
and impressed, and the artilleric thunders of the World- 
War spread their noises farther and farther, tolling more 
and more the dead of multiplying war nations and races. 


112 


THE EXODUS. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

AT HOME IN DISGUISE. 

Frederick and Theodore were gloomy spectators of the 
swinging backward of the National Dial when the Southern 
Regime gained National authority and controlled the Feder- 
al Government. Frederick lost his Assistant District At- 
torneyship in the Department of Justice but Theodore was 
retained in position as head of a department of a great 
Northern Industrial Plant. The brother in Boston and the 
other brother in New York State read the horrifying news 
of robbery and murder against their young brother Pollard. 
Then came the announcement, a few days later through 
the Press, of the brutal and savage Georgia lynching. On 
the heels of this, Thelma’s true version of the tragedy 
reached each with what flimsy threads hung her innocent 
and pure young life and the terrifying and significance of 
her iminent peril. Each brother wired the other to proceed 
at once to the City of Washington for conference and plans. 

The next morning, after she shot and killed young 
Lamart. Thelma Marshall found herself in a deep quandry 
and a very tight place. Deeds and things which she never 
dreamed would have become a part of her life, now stared 
her in the face. She found her coveted trip to the South, 
devoutly yearned for and entered upon only and solely to 
teach the backward children of her too illiterate and neg- 
lected Race, had brought her into a deep and bloody play, 
that crowned her guiltless hands and virgin soul with the 
death of a- boastful, aristocratic, young Southern white 
man, whom she herself had sent to Eternity, with a shin- 
ing, brandishing revolver in his hands and his dirty, black 
soul stained with his attempt to rape and murder her upon 
the highway that ran through his father’s plantation, 
Brightly as God’s sun shone for her that morning in 
Dixieland the beautiful sunny South, it was nevertheless, a 
dark and dismal morning for her. 

William Clark came very early that morning and had 


AT HOME IN DISGUISE 


113 


a conference all alone with Pollard Lewis. After Clerk 
had gone, Lewis advised Thelma not to go to the school, 
but, vividly remembering young Oscar Adam's treacherous 
part, she told him that she must go to the school, and, even 
before her appointed and usual time our dainty, plucky, 
brown Yankee maiden, hastened forward to her post of 
duty. Fortunately, young Oscar Adams was among the 
first who came that morning, and, as no word of the tragedy 
had as yet reached him, Thelma was able to get Oscar 
Adams to keep to himself what young Lamart had paid 
him to do and the Negro boy, emphasizing his determina- 
tion spoke thus: “I'm mighty sorry I sold myself to that 
low down white man, young Mr. Lamart, for a dollar; but 
I'm going to keep my mouth shut, and it is the very last 
time that Oscar Adams will be any white mans Nigger for 
money !" 

By the time most of the children had gathered and 
just before “school took up," mounted white men, led by 
a furious, savage Lamart overseer, rode up to the school- 
house and Lamart's overseer bawled, “Come here gal, did 
that black rascal, Pol Lewis, go to school here to you?" 

“Pollard Lewis attended my school, I was his teacher." 

“Be keerful, Sis, no bucky, uppish, up North stunts 
from you, or we'll fix you!” 

At the conclusion of this tirade and the end of his 
threat, he extended a ponderous Colt high up into the air 
above his head and fired until all of its bullets were dis- 
charged. Then all of the fierce band gave loud and blood- 
curdling, wild, rebel yells. Panic seized Thelma’s pupils 
and the younger ones cried and screamed. 

xhe Lamart overseer immediately commanded, “Git 
'em all rounded and sen' 'em home. They oughter be 
pickin’ cotton an’ shucken' corn, whut God Ermighty made 
'em fer; you cain't edyucate Niggers; school-houses just 
made only fer white folks; they make Niggers murders, 
thieves, and wenches. Ole Booka T's dun more harm in 


114 


THE EXODUS. 


the South than Death and Satan, and that s whar this 
murdering Pol Nigger fixin’ to go to school to, we oiter 
have the Klu Klucks back an’ organized, an’ then we’ud 
end this Tuskegee. Don’t you run this school any more 
tell you are notified by the Committee!” 

The conference of Frederick and Theodore at the na- 
tion's Capitol soon occured. The killing of young Lamart, 
the brutal and speedy lynching of their brother and the 
circumstances under which Thelma remained in the South 
and had her school closed were considered. Frederick 
Douglass Lewis of Boston, Massachusetts, the erstwhile 
holder of a Presidential Commission in the Department of 
Justice did not dale go to secure aid and succor from the 
President of the United States; to assure and swear to 
him that his ambitious and inspiring brother had been 
lynched and he was innocent as Christ of any murder, that 
his family and sweetheart were in perillous jeopardy, and 
that the only person guilty in all that dreadful phantasma- 
goria of killing, lynching, and savagery was Robert Lee 
Beauregard Lamart, aristocratic young Southernor and 
Princeton graduate, who bought his own death attempting 
rape, and then murder upon a dainty, pure, refined brown 
Yankee maiden. Not a jot of hope for the American Negro 
lay in anything that had transpired at the White House 
since the advent of the righteous Southernor. The dial 
only pointed to and spelled Dark despair. Frederick too 
well remembered the “Jim Crow” executive of Department 
Orders; the driving away from the White House of his 
distinguished, fellow townsman, William Trotter; that 
Senator Francis of Maryland, failed to get an interview at 
the White House for his representative Negro delegation, 
and that the learned and polite Dr. Kelly Miller, a resident 
of the Capitol City, found but one accessible way to the 
President’s attention, if such was given to his 1917 August 
appeal for the Negro, and that made through the too 
crowded mailbag. 

Former Russian Nihilists and Siberian exiles were be- 


AT HOME IN DISGUISE 


115 


ing welcomed by Kerensky; Sinn Feiners by David Lloyd 
George, but there stood Frederick Douglass Lewis and his 
brother, native-born, brown Americans, at the very door of 
the White House in Washington, D. C., with a brother taken 
from them by murderous lynchers and a family and sweet- 
heart in peril of murderous fire and shot yet he dare not 
go in, 

“Behold a stranger at the door, 

Has knocked long, has knocked before, 

Has waited long, is waiting still; 

Thou treatest no other friend so ill.” 

History and Tradition love and ever will love to relate 
that when the American Commoner, the Great Emancipa- 
tor, the People's President was occupant of the White House 
during the Civil War, politicians had to wait for Mr. Lin- 
coln, while he listened calmly, patient, and unruffled, to 
Southern rebel women, begging for the lives of their men 
captured, common enemies and secret spies against the 
Union; Negroes, appealing for the freedom, and freeing 
from shackeled bondage and the enobling with American 
citizenship of their slave chained kindred; and patriots of 
the North, demanding more than man could do in the suc- 
cessful prosecution and quick determination of the war. 
Abraham Lincoln was not polished in glittering phrases of 
Pharaseic Cant; he shone forth with no scholarly pinnacles 
of Sadduceic, Hypocricy ; he was a simple plain-speaking 
President; he was a Christian with an open arm and beat- 
ing heart for all humanity, and never drove any one from 
the White House. That's a Southern precedent, for Liberty 
•seeking and polite visitors. 

Some days after their conference in the City of Wash- 
ington, there got off the incoming Southern train at Haw- 
kinsville, two Negro preachers, garbed in the usual attire 
of ordinary Negro ministers of the gospel. Both wore abun- 
dant beards on the face and so violently expressed them- 
selves on Baptistic points of immersion, burying the caught 
sinner deep and straight under a plenty of water, that, 


116 


THE EXODUS. 


had Young Pollard Lewis survived, he never would have 
recognized the two as Frederick and Theodore. 

“Brother Ebemezer, I’se tole you that the act of re- 
demption ain’t neber been finished, tell d ramshacked sinner 
been sure buried, deep and dead, in plenty of good Baptist 
water, and its Baptist Bible I’se spitting to you out’er Bap- 
tist mouth from er Baptist heart, with a Baptist tongue, 
from a Baptist soul, an’ what I say will tek anybody, since 
he’s sure nuff Baptist to heaven,” one loudly argued as the 
two rumbled on away with their luggage. Finally they 
boarded a buggy and the two were rapidly driven to the 
home of Pollard Lewis, their father. Thus for the first 
time since they left the South for the North, Frederick and 
Theodore had returned home in disguise. 


THE EXODUS 


117 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE EXODUS. 

THE EXODUS, this much going of Negroes from the 
South to the North, East and West. He who is Omnipotent 
and Omniscience alone knows and can tell what it shall do 
for democracy and freedom in the United States of America. 
Among others, three Negro Newspapers have trid to esti- 
mate THE EXODUS. The Atlanta Independent viewed it 
as the natural expressions of human beings who wisely 
seized on an opportunity to get what they had been con- 
stantly longing for, namely, a man's fair wage, a citizen's 
living conditions, and being recognized by the governmental 
authorities and their white neighbors according to the sta- 
tutes of law and the standards of the Bible, all of which had 
been denied to the Negroes of the South who leaving it, were 
seeking the things hitherto denied them. The Birmingham 
Reporter, professed to view THE EXODUS with intense 
alarm and measured it as a sporadic, spasmodic, thought- 
less breaking up of Negroes, caught in the net of merce- 
nary, wily employment-agents, without whom the EXODUS 
could not succeed; that those going would find Northern 
whites indifferent, strange, and unapproachable who would 
soon rid themselves of the EXODUS Negroes; that the 
Southern whites (Lamart men), out of long contact, were 
the Negroes' friends and best understood the Race; and 
that Southern Negroes were not adapted to stand the cold 
and severe weather of the North. The Chicago Defender 
dwelt upon abundance of work with double the Southern 
pay and even more than that, plenty of public facilities and 
utilities such as libraries, parks, amusements, and other 
facilities, a man's chance and share in municipal and state 
governments, and the real existence for all the people, black 
and white of democratic government which is nowhere to be 
found in the South. 

But in Dixieland THE EXODUS is better understood 
than it will ever be expressed. The Lewises, Clarks, and 


118 


THE EXODUS. 


Lamarts as well know the compelling forces and driving 
powers of it all. When train upon train, with crowded cars, 
packed with Negro Exodits pour out of the South, there is 
absolutely no fear for the indifference, strangeness, and un- 
approachableness of the whites of the North; nor cold cli- 
mate and severe weathers; employment-agents count no 
more in it than ticket-punchers on the Railroad trains, and 
it is no sparodic, spasmodic, thoughtless rush, but a divine 
pilgrimage. Families fled from aristocratic, cold-blooded, 
calculating, hard-hearted refined Lamarts; women from 
rape or murder on the highways ; children for schoolhouses 
that can never be closed by mobs of savage whites, giving 
vent to rebel yells and shouting for the return of Klu Kluck 
Days; the laborer, mechanic, and young farm lads for 
opportunity and to see their maidens pure, and unmolested, 
and from the fire, rope, and shot of lynchers; the ambitious 
educated, and prepared for industrial and governmental 
positions, and fit American recognition in fair and just 
recompense for their days of arduous toils and long and 
weary nights of constant and persistent study. All flee 
from the indecency and robbery of “Jim Crow Cars.” THE 
EXODUS for the submerged blacks or the South is the 
cream of the milk of human benefits and deliverance that 
Providence is bestowing out of the GREAT WORLD WAR, 
notwithstanding, the white Lamarts and the black Bir- 
mingham Reporters. As the liberty-loving of the earth 
now struggle for victory on the European battle fields, to 
overthrow autocracy and tyranny, the Negroes flee from 
Dixieland, seeking Democracy. As it abounds with abun- 
dant sunshine, plentiful rains, and fine seasons. When the 
South becomes democratic for the Negro his return will 
be assured. 

The entire Lewis family gave up their beautiful cot- 
tage on a high, sunkissed hill in Dixieland, gave up their 
coveted and well-tilled farm-lands, their fowl and their cat- 
tle; left the man who risked his life and the lives of his 
children and kindred for their deliverance and rescue from 


THE EXODUS 


119 


Peonage and slavery, and became a part of THE EXODUS. 
The peonage and slavery, romance and usefulness of the 
Lewis family, is a sealed book in Georgia and the South- 
land. 

Under the strong protection of William Clark and other 
Lincolnesque Southerners, all the family, with Thelma Mar- 
shall, boarded an EXODUS SPECIAL and they safely 
escaped from the South. 

It is Summer again in the great City of Buffalo, 
Niagara Falls has cast off her beautiful livery of snow and 
ice; the Gorge has become animated with life and plants 
and the Rapids are once more spectacular and sparkling with 
mountains of changing white torrents. Travelers are com- 
ing in and going out. There was a wedding of peculiar in- 
terest to us. The heroine of Lam art’s River Bottoms and 
THE EXODUS, our dainty, brown, Yankee school teacher, 
Thelma Marshall, stood at a Northern altar and in holy 
matrimony gave herself for life to Frederick Douglass 
Lewis. 








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